Page 48 of Gifted & Talented

43

Monster had recently become very interested in balance-related exercises. He was constantly trying to tightrope on things, like a very preliminary gymnast, although he was not especially talented in this regard. Thus, Arthur and I were forced to make our way very slowly through Muir Woods along the initial two-mile loop that was accessible via carefully placed wooden beams. Monster held my hand, setting one foot carefully in front of the other, making a reasonable effort not to topple sideways into the clovers, or onto the delicate tangles of redwood roots plaiting the forest floor.

Arthur, meanwhile, was silent at first, thinking about children, about progeny, and about the time he’d once had sex with me, which if I haven’t already mentioned was the height of adolescent awkwardness. For Arthur, the day had been one of semi-enchanted suspension. He remembered it all in terms of sensations, the rain that fell on the skylights of his room, the way he had always felt his father’s house to be a sort of glass cage. The relief of not being alone; the piercing joy of a moment with me that did not involve Meredith. He was running the tips of his fingers up and down my bare arms, thinking about how everything would soon be different. He had an image in his head of defending me to Meredith, of becoming my knight in shining armor, of taking a broken situation and righting it, clotting the wound and thus being forever cocooned by love and gratitude or whatever Arthur expected to find whenever sex was involved.

I don’t think I need to tell you that Arthur and I had very different experiences that day. Though, for the record, it was my first time, too. I never told him that because Arthur has a way of assigning meaning to things unnecessarily. It’s very preternaturally witchy of him, and/or slightly OCD.

“Interesting choice of meeting place,” he told me as we made our way slowly over the beams, beneath the canopy of trees. “Reminds me of… you know.”

Oh god, I thought, having then forgotten about Arthur’s habit of assigning meaning. Like I said, I remember the day in question very differently. I remember thinking how fucking insane Arthur’s sheets were. Why did a teenage boy have such nice sheets? The boys at Ainsworth all had excellent bedding, better than anything I’d ever slept in, though to me, my sheets were softer for being more broken in, for smelling as much like my mother’s house as they possibly could without the constant presence of platanos frying or adobo simmering on the stove.

“It opens early and I could take Monster,” I told Arthur. “Don’t make a thing of it.”

In his head, Arthur was totally making a thing of it. He was thinking about the women in his life, the love he felt for both Philippa and Gillian, how different they were from each other, how different they were from me. He projected in his mind the imaginary future he and I might have had together, which admittedly I had thought of many times myself in the past.

There was a time I would have given anything to be a Wren—absolutely anything. Meredith was my first friend, Arthur my first love, or maybe it was the other way around, I don’t know. Even after everything fell apart I still frequently imagined it, although my renditions of what it would take to be a Wren grew increasingly vindictive. I stopped marrying Arthur in my imagination and started simply beating Meredith. As Dumas put it, “How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.” I thought about saying that one day to Meredith’s face, looking particularly hot for no reason other than to rub it in, the proof that I was the phoenix, that I was the once and future Wren, because I was actually so much better than they were. For years that single thought, that crystalline desire drove me constantly through exhaustion, pushed me limitlessly through pain. I was only properly motivated when I imagined the chance I so plainly deserved to laugh, laugh, laugh in Meredith’s fucking face.

I had to stop putting it in those terms, though, because the more my fantasies revolved around Meredith, the more agonizingly obvious it became which Wren sibling I had actually loved most.

In any case, to lose Arthur and Meredith in one fell swoop was easier to do once I was angry. I don’t think I could have given either of them up if not for Meredith running me over with her proverbial car, and where would I be if she hadn’t? Would I now be Arthur’s politician wife? And what about Meredith—what would I have been to her? Wouldn’t we always have drifted apart until I was no different from any other sorority sister she couldn’t bring herself to call?

I don’t see any of it anymore, even when I try, probably because Monster doesn’t coexist with the possibility of that branch of lives unlived. The thought of uninventing him pains me, it literally pains me, somewhere deep in my chest. So I guess I’ve taught myself in recent years that the chips simply fall where they may—which sounds an awful lot like I’m getting an A in therapy, so hearty congratulations to me.

“Mama,” said Monster. “Ball. Ball. Ball. Car.” (To Arthur, this sounded like “bahhhhhhhh” and “cahhhhhhhh,” which is fair, as he is less fluent in Monster’s particular dialect.)

“Yes,” I said. “Totally.”

“Car,” said Monster.

“Yes, car, very good. What do you see, honey? Trees? Can you say ‘tree’?”

Monster thought about it.

“Car,” he said.

“He’s a little behind, verbally,” I explained to Arthur, having forgotten I’d already said that. Arthur, meanwhile, had a faint smile on his face. His hands were tucked into his pockets, his eyes drifting upward, to the trees framing the gray sky overhead.

“Behind what?” Arthur asked.

“Behind other theoretical children,” I said. “Or, I don’t know, something.”

“I think he’s perfect,” said Arthur with a shrug. “What does he need to talk for? He knows they’re trees. It’s cars we’ve left out of the conversation.”

I’d been wondering why I’d ever felt so painfully in love with Arthur Wren, right up until that moment, when I remembered.

“So,” I said, to cover the embarrassing possibility that maybe Arthur would know what I was thinking, although I think I’ve made it clear that he was consistently very dense when it came to identifying the devotion of others, “you’ve got a case of the deaths.”

“I do come back, though, which is nice,” he said.

“Okay, so what’s the problem?”

I meant it as a joke, but Arthur took it very seriously. He turned his chin up to the sky again and—I cannot emphasize this enough—he is better looking than he has any right to be. It’s no wonder he has eight girlfriends and ten husbands. Or whatever. Let’s not focus on my opinion of this moment, though. It’s unproductive.

Arthur was thinking about the problem, as if I had said it in proper noun terms. What’s The Problem? is what Arthur heard me ask him, even though, again, I was only joking.

“Do you think it’s possible to be in love with more than one person?” he asked.

Yes. For example, both the Wrens simultaneously, in troublingly inseverable ways.

I said, “I think we have a lot of different kinds of loves.”

“I might be having a daughter,” Arthur said, “named Riot.”

“Great name,” I said.

“That’s what I thought!” He turned a sunny glance at me. “Riot Wren.”

“Alliterative.”

“I know. What’s your son’s name?”

“Michael Jordan.”

“Stop. Do you think Riot Revolution Wren is overdoing it?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s a solid ten steps too far.”

Arthur sighed heavily. “Damn.” The beams of the path creaked beneath his foot. We were winding our way through the woods at a glacial pace, though we had come to a bridge that crossed over a stream to another path on the opposite side.

Sometimes Monster liked to run back and forth across bridges. “Want to cross the bridge?” I asked him, hoping that might divert him from his unsteady gymnastic pursuits.

He considered it with a pensive frown. Then he returned his attention to the balance beam without a word.

“Okay,” I said a little glumly.

Arthur laughed.

“As for you,” I began, returning to the subject at hand and to the wording I’d found strange until I’d gotten distracted by the name of his theoretical child, “what do you mean you might be having a daughter?”

“Oh. Well, my…” Arthur looked around, checking for any eavesdropping reporters before turning back to me. “My girlfriend might be pregnant.” He told me briefly about Yves and Philippa, about the way they’d met, about how much he loved them both, and the thing about Philippa being “beautifully difficult,” like that was a novelty and not just a description of his sister. Or me.

“You really have a type,” I sighed.

“Yves is different, though,” he said, defensively. “And so is Gillian.”

“Yeah, but they’re not the ones you’re considering part of the problem, are they?”

“I don’t think that’s fair.” Arthur sounded troubled, his brow knitting pensively, precisely the way Monster’s had done at the earlier prospect of switching to another activity. “And it’s not like it sounds, you know, the whole sleeping-with-other-people thing. It’s not an affair, not in the clichéd sense. It’s different.”

That sounded a lot like what everyone who sleeps with other people says and I told him so.

“Well, okay, fair.” Arthur did feel more shameful than he usually did, explaining his lifestyle to me. Normally, people (chronically online people, but I digress) just accepted that it was progressive and sexually fluid and entirely within his rights as a human being who wanted nothing more than to combat loneliness, to be alive, which Arthur usually felt a sort of smugness over when it came to his own precocious liberality.

But I wasn’t really moving my face very much, and he had the sense that I had probably had polyamorous relationships of my own—which I had, for a brief period of time, not that it’s worth getting into. The point is that Arthur could tell while he was talking to me that everything he claimed about the forward-leaning grandiosity, the utter profundity of love in his relationship was, you know, bullshit-resembling.

“You always make me feel so conventional,” Arthur told me, apropos of nothing, while scraping a hand through his hair. We had been silent for a while at the time, because Arthur was thinking about what I thought of him and I was thinking about whether Monster could be convinced to eat tacos for lunch. And, yes, I was also thinking about Meredith.

“I don’t think I’m the one making you feel that way,” I pointed out.

“Because it’s not like I’m cheating on my wife,” he insisted.

“Sure,” I agreed.

“She knows about it. She supports it. Our relationship is, you know—”

“Progressive?” I guessed with an undertone of irony.

Arthur heard it. He turned to me with a sudden burst of energy.

“I am progressive,” he said.

“Okay,” I agreed.

“It’s not my fault I can’t get anything done. Politics is fucked, Lou, it’s just fucked . Sorry,” he said to Monster, who had certainly heard worse from his own mother’s mouth. “I came into office and I tried to change things but two years is… it’s nothing,” he ranted, beginning to pace across the wooden trail. “It’s just absolutely nothing—in two years I accomplished fuck all and now they’re pulling me from office and I’ll just forever be this blip . Just some nepo baby who said oh sure let’s regulate magitech and let’s get rid of the guns and let’s make things safe for immigrants and of course I’m pro-choice and then in the end, I’m just, like, another guy.” He said that last word with unbelievable derision, which was so funny to me that I snorted a laugh. “What?” he demanded, hurtfully. “And anyway, what do they want me to do? ‘Nepo baby’ this, ‘nepo baby’ that—should I just kill myself, is that the only way to solve the ethical issue of my existence? Should I stop breathing, is that what they want?”

He was breathing hard, like he was on the verge of tears.

“Whoa, whoa,” I said loudly, pretending to cover Monster’s ears. “Profanity is one thing, but I draw the line at intrusive thoughts. And anyway,” I added, changing tack because Monster was annoyed that I was doing something other than helping him on the balance beam, “I think we may have stumbled upon the source of your little death problem, Congressman Wren. You’re just sick to death of other people.”

He exhaled, deflating like a balloon.

“That’s not true.” He folded his arms over his chest. “I like the idea of people.”

“Unfortunately, though, we’re not an idea,” I said. “Nor are we a good idea. Not the time for it, but my personal theory is that we’re God’s starter universe. He seems to have messed up somewhere, maybe even right away, with the chromosome problem where all mammals sunburn, and now I think He’s not only not an interventionist, He’s actively left the building. He’s like, you know what, bro? I’m trying again! Milky Way can suck a dick, the end.”

“Ball!” said Monster excitedly.

“Is this your way of telling me I’m being overdramatic?” asked Arthur, with a deep sigh.

It wasn’t, but since he seemed a little more subdued, I felt I was achieving a breakthrough, however incidentally.

“So what if you’re just some guy, huh?” I asked, poking him in the shoulder. “What’s wrong with being ‘some guy’?”

“I said ‘another guy,’ but thanks for making it unbelievably worse,” said Arthur.

“Why? I’m just some lady. I’m some fucking mom , Arthur, I mean. Can you imagine?”

“But that’s amazing,” Arthur insisted.

“Sure, to you, because you know me. But to my congressman, am I anything? Am I anything to the ruler of Dubai? Am I anything to the man at the deli counter? I will answer that question for you now—unless I’m wearing mascara and a pair of tiny athletic shorts, forget it. I am absolutely some guy,” I ruefully bemoaned.

“Do you know who your congressman is?” asked Arthur.

“The problem isn’t the election,” I said. “Which you haven’t even lost yet.”

“I’m going to lose.” He sounded so maudlin I laughed aloud.

“Imagine,” I said performatively to Monster, “being the youngest congressman in the history of the United States and you’re still mostly in kindergarten.”

“Car!” said Monster. “Car, car, car—”

“It’s not the election,” Arthur said insistently.

“I know, I just said that,” I reminded him.

“It’s a magic problem,” he said, showing me his hands. “I keep starting fires!”

“I haven’t seen you do anything weird since yesterday. And why did you come to the fucking redwoods if you’re a fire hazard?”

“I—” He seemed pained again. “Jesus, what am I doing?”

He looked around, as if for an exit, which clearly there wouldn’t be, because we were only a quarter of the way through a two-mile loop. “Arthur, you’re fine,” I told him. “It’s fine. If you burn down Muir Woods, I’m sure that will have no effect whatsoever on your reelection chances.”

“Stop,” he begged, helplessly.

“Your marriage does seem genuinely problematic,” I said. “You were always, you know, a little physical.”

I flushed, which led Arthur to think I was referencing our teenage tryst. I hadn’t meant to, but unfortunately I was thinking about it. Abuela had always said Arthur was especially good at kinesis, the physical magics, because there was something primally physical in him. He was connected to his body, to his being, in a way that Meredith wasn’t, and in a way I only sometimes was. When we slept together that one time, which I hesitate to discuss without sounding like an absolute creep, I understood that for Arthur, touch was magic and magic was touch and everything was very real that way, very grounded. Existential thoughts, fleeting fears of disapproval and being forgotten by time and space, they just evaporated for him. They just didn’t exist, not the way Arthur existed. Also, he could do a fun trick with his fingers, which we’d looked up on the internet a few hours before because what can I say, we were teenagers.

“What I mean is that I don’t think you can go on as you are,” I told him. “It’s fine to have different relationships with different people. But not a whole bunch of people who are lying to each other about what they want. Honestly, it’s a cesspool.”

“His eyes are lighter than yours,” Arthur noted, fixing his attention on Monster for a moment.

“He has two sets of genetics, Art, he wasn’t a virgin birth. And are you listening? I’m not saying your problems aren’t magical, but your magic definitely won’t work if your heart is broken.”

I hadn’t meant to use those words. I meant more like his soul, or his being. I don’t know why the word heart came out except that Lola had put it that way before she died. You are my heart and I am yours, my magic is your magic and you are mine, and that is why, hija, I will never leave you.

So basically, what I meant to tell Arthur was: Your magic won’t stop malfunctioning if you don’t get the rest of your shit together. But that’s not what he heard.

“It’s just,” Arthur said with a sigh, “that I want Riot to be outside the window, and if she isn’t then I don’t think I can stay.”

He said it with such overwhelming misery that I had to look away from him then. I didn’t want to get pulled back under. I was a grown woman now, an adult with a child, I understood how to pay taxes and which fabrics went with which setting on my washing machine. It wasn’t my job anymore to make a sad, motherless boy laugh.

We were entering Cathedral Grove, home to the highest redwoods in Muir Woods. Patches of pale blue sky were breaking through in shards, the grayness of morning fog threatening to give. Imagine the tallest trees, the puffs of your breath in the air, the sanctity of the silence. It was, I thought, missing my grandmother, a very physical place.

I joke about the abandonment of my personal experimental God, but really, you have to give it up for nature. It’s almost better if it’s all a breathtaking accident. It’s a reminder that from chaos can come peace.

The balance beam had ended and Monster darted ahead, over to the benches facing the running burble of the stream. Arthur and I lingered, looking up at the trees.

It was so, so quiet. Birth of the universe quiet. Arthur was looking at me, thinking about all the time he’d missed, the people I had been in all the phases of my life that he had forgone, the times he’d thought of me at the very same times I thought of him, the togetherness we hadn’t shared and couldn’t know. He was looking at me with nostalgia, with fondness. With love that was softer because it was worn.

He was looking at me, and I could feel his eyes on me, and I hadn’t told him yet, but I was just so angry that morning. I was angry about my mother’s diagnosis; about the people in life you are given just to lose. I was angry about my son’s pediatrician heavily implying that I was a bad mother because I still pulled him into bed with me whenever he wanted me to, because I didn’t like to hear him cry, and because verbally he was still a little behind. I was angry that I could never really shake the fear that someone might consider Monster’s dad a better alternative to me, that he was a better father than I was a mother because he came from money, because his father was a lawyer and his mother was a lawyer and there were lawyers all up and down that family lineage like a fucking life achievement waterslide. I was angry that Arthur Wren had come back into my life at a time when I was still a little too weak not to love him. I was angry that I could love my life so dearly, cherish it so completely, just to see its reflection in Meredith’s sunglasses as a mirage of the ways I had failed. I was angry that I had lived my life so freely for so long, so fearlessly, until my son was born and then I realized how small I was, how fragile, how very full of terror I’d become. I had to stay alive for him, I had to be happy for him, I had to be fucking happy and Meredith Wren still hadn’t figured out how! I was angry, I was bitter, my life was full and yet, somehow, my heart was still broken—had been broken for over a decade, unfixable still. I was angry, and for fuck’s sake, I was tired. I have a toddler, okay? I was really fucking tired .

So, in the middle of nature’s church, I tilted my head back and I screamed.