Page 9

Palm Springs

January 3, 2023

1:00 P.M.

The first time Grant left, he went to Sasha.

Grant and I hadn’t dated for more than a few weeks before Sasha became a presence in our lives. One auspicious morning, we were holed up together in his 1920s Hyde Park apartment near the University of Chicago during a raging blizzard. We’d just made love—again. We’d made love so many times that we’d run out of condoms, and it was too horrible outside to go get some more Trojans at the 7-Eleven.

He knew his way around my body. His desire for praise would soon drive me crazy, but his eagerness to please also made him a good lover. He wanted me to say, “That was great. How’d you know how to do that?”—and I did. Before Grant, I was fumbling and awkward in bed. It was as though I was discovering sex for the first time, and I couldn’t get enough of it. We moved to the same rhythm; it was a language we were proficient in.

Snow whipped around beyond Grant’s windows; dense, glittery stars of frost had exploded over the glass. The radiator hissed. The couple in the apartment next door made food that smelled of ginger and cardamom. Somewhere outside I heard the city plows rumble past. I never wanted the storm to end, never wanted to go back to the sterile Gold Coast high-rise I’d once shared with Basil, never wanted to peel myself out of the warm tangle of our limbs. We were melted together, love drunk.

Grant groaned and pulled me to him as I motioned to stand. “Don’t go. Don’t ever go. I mean it.”

“I’ll be right back. Promise.” I looked down at my body. My skin was marked by the folds in his hunter-green sheets, my hair a mess. I walked like a cowboy to the bathroom in his bathrobe, smelling like him, feeling as if I was his. In the whirlwind since that New Year’s kiss, we were so hot and heavy, so lusty and full of conversation and questions, that I knew, even if it didn’t work out with Grant (it had to!), my marriage to Basil had really been a union between friends.

Never before had I felt so desired—and desirable. For the first time in my life, I believed I was beautiful. I’d taken on that glow that caused me to be noticed by strangers. As sad as I’d been when Basil came out, it terrified me to think that I could have gone my whole life without knowing this feeling. Grant was a revelation, a drug, a portal to a different life. I didn’t just want to be near him; I wanted to absorb him into my cells.

We couldn’t stand to be apart. I was useless at work, so distracted by the memory of the exact sound of Grant’s voice when he said my name. I’d close my eyes and my spine would hum when I imagined his jawline, the soft bottoms of his feet, the arch of his eyebrows, the desirous look in his eyes. On my desk was my application to work as a gallery associate at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and another application for an MFA at the Pratt Institute. I threw them in the trash, deciding that Grant was my next and only destination. Just like that, my whole world narrowed around one man.

His varied interests were on display in his long hallway. He was easily fascinated by every little thing, from Civil War submarines to astronomy, speed skating to the grain of the wood on his kitchen table. He was a collector. Metal souvenir statues of skyscrapers lined his windowsill. He had at least a dozen pairs of vintage binoculars on his dresser, along with loose change and twenty-dollar bills wadded up like old Kleenex—hundreds of dollars. Money didn’t mean much to him. After meeting the Underwoods, I saw it as a refreshing sign that we shared the same values: he wasn’t materialistic. I believed his lack of financial vigilance was in sync with my values of austerity. Later, I’d see that his disinterest in money could make him careless about how he spent it, while I cared too much, operating from a scarcity mentality that made Grant crazy.

He’d framed several rare, signed letters from notable figures in history. Some were written on personal stationery, some on onion paper, others on yellowed heavy stock. They were all difficult to read. He had a letter from Ivan Pavlov, and one from Brigadier General Charles H. Morgan, which I tried to make out—something about officers at Alcatraz. Grant told me that in his free time he would go through his Who’s Who book and write letters to scholars and celebrities he admired and see if they would write back. His favorite sound was the clanging of the mailman’s chain of keys in the lobby. He never knew what might show up in his mailbox on any given day. One of my favorite qualities about Grant was that he could be fascinated by what other people might find boring. As my college friends said when they met him, he lived like an old man.

But there, among the framed-letters collection, I noticed a small, square painting on a piece of clapboard. It was of two lovers walking arm in arm on the beach as the sun set. The male figure looked a lot like Grant; the woman was a wisp, with short blond hair. He leaned over and into his lover, his hand around her tiny waist. Grant didn’t hold me like that. Maybe because I’m tall, or because I generally don’t like to be protected or possessed, even though, sometimes, I do.

Grant then joined me in the hall. His expression shifted when he saw me looking at the painting and just like that, the spell we were under was broken.

“Who’s that?” I asked, my stomach knotted up.

The question pained him. “My stepsister Lisa did it.” He didn’t say she’d painted it. She’d done it.

“She’s talented,” I lied. I found Lisa’s painting sentimental and poorly rendered. She’d used too much white, a problem for beginners, and she also stopped painting too early, another problem for begin ners. The effect was especially troubling because it implied there was more to be done.

“It was a wedding gift.”

“You’re married?” I could feel my heart seize up. “Seriously?”

My friends had warned me. They said to be careful about rebound relationships and moving too fast. I didn’t even know this guy, they said, but I insisted I did. In the first five minutes, I was convinced I knew everything that mattered about Grant.

I ran into his room and began angrily gathering up my clothes. I needed to get dressed and get the hell out of there.

He reached for my arm and tried to hold me back. “You can’t leave. You’ll never get home in this weather. Kim, come on. It’s dangerous outside.”

“It’s more dangerous in here!” I was trying hard not to cry. Polly hated it when I cried. She hated any outburst of emotion. You’re fine, she’d say. This city is filled with people who have worse problems than you. “I can’t believe this.”

“I was going to say something, but—”

“Why didn’t you tell me about her? I told you all about Basil.” I pounded his chest with my fists. “I should have never let myself fall in love with you.”

Grant grabbed my hands to still them. His face lit up with a broad grin. “Did you just say you’re in love with me?”

“What difference does it make?” I had no intention of showing my cards so early in our relationship, but I couldn’t take the words back. I was dying inside.

“Kim, stop. Listen to me. Sasha and I aren’t together anymore.”

Sasha? I hated that she had a pretty name, an interesting name.

“You’re divorced?”

“Not yet. We’ve been separated. The paperwork isn’t final yet, but believe me when I tell you it’s a done deal.”

My emotions had been on an elevator ride that plunged and suddenly stopped before hitting the ground. I’d gone from losing Grant to getting him back in seconds.

“What happened? What did she do? How long were you married? Where did you meet her?”

“Hang on, slow down. Long story short: we wanted different things.”

I was so far gone, and so scared of losing it all again, that I decided right then and there that if we were going to work out, I would try to want what Grant wanted. And that’s what I did, at least at first.

He started to say more—and froze. “Actually, I’m not ready to talk about it yet, if that’s okay. It’s pretty fresh.”

In those blissful first few weeks, nothing had been off-limits. Already, our first boundary had been erected. We weren’t one thing anymore—we were on the path to becoming individuals again.

I reached for my jeans from his floor and set them on my lap. “I need to know what happened right now, and if you don’t tell me, I’m going to walk right into that snowstorm and get run over by a plow.”

“I’m afraid I’ll scare you away. I was a first-class jerk.”

“Tell me! You cheated on her?”

He was clearly in pain. “No. I let her down in the worst way. Honestly, we shouldn’t have gotten together to begin with, much less marry. We met two years ago. We were in the same metaphysical rationalism class. I thought she was brilliant. She is brilliant, way smarter than me. She’s very bright.”

“I only have a BA.”

“Don’t compare yourself to Sasha. Please. Don’t compare yourself to anyone. You’re one of a kind, a singular sensation.” And then, after saying that, he went on to compare me to her: “You’re way more even-keeled than she is.”

“I don’t feel even-keeled at this moment. But go on.”

“We started working on a paper together, and the paper became a book idea, and we’re cowriting it. We had this weird sapiosexual relationship.”

“A sapio—?”

“When a brain thing is romance, where the ideas are like the sex. We decided to get married—the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done. I knew I’d made a mistake the minute I said, ‘I do.’ For two people working on Ph.D.s, we couldn’t have been more stupid. We talked about the big stuff of ideas but never the big stuff of life. The futures we wanted were totally incompatible, like our philosophical interests intersected but nothing else. We didn’t like doing the same things or even eating the same food. The kicker was that I wanted a family, and I assumed she did, too. She didn’t. She’s adamantly opposed to having kids.”

“I want a family!” I interrupted. How bold I was! “It’s always been just me and my mom, and my dad.…” It was still hard to talk about Burl’s passing. He’d been gone two years at that point. “My dad was great, but he was only there for part of the year. I want a house full of kids, big family dinners, traditions, you name it.”

Grant kissed each of my fingertips. “See? You’re different. I’m going to make our kids feel like they’re special and planned.” Planned? Little did we know that we were becoming a family at that very moment: my egg had been fertilized and it was splitting into two, making its way down my fallopian tube, busily dividing and dividing again and again to create two new humans, binding Grant and me together forever.

Our kids? He’d said that so casually.

After all I’d been through, shouldn’t this ramped-up discussion of commitment have terrified me? Shouldn’t it have terrified him? Why were we talking as if we’d decided to spend our lives together?

“So, what happened with Sasha?” I was hoping he’d say she’d run off to Antarctica or thrown herself off a cliff. We sank back into bed, and he told me the rest of the story while staring up at the cracks in his plaster ceiling.

“I thought there was something wrong with me. She’s smart, and she’s a real knockout. By far the best-looking woman in the philosophy department, although that’s not saying much.” Did he need to mention her looks? “And don’t get me wrong, I love attention. This was too much, though. She was always checking in on me. She bought me clothes. She wanted to know about my feelings. She was always asking if I loved her and how much and why, and what did I remember about the first time I met her, and when did I know—it was suffocating because I didn’t feel the same way.”

To me, this sounded like the normal stuff of a new relationship.

“One day last September, we hadn’t been married half a year, and I was heading back from Madison, where I’d interviewed for a postdoc position. I was in a bad mood because I was convinced that I’d blown it and messed up one of the answers. I imagined Sasha waiting here for me—”

She lived in this apartment? Slept in this bed? Suddenly I saw the space differently.

“I knew she’d ask me how it went, and she’d want to know everything, and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t go back and look at her or hear her voice. I couldn’t admit I’d failed. My father used to tell me that I screwed up everything and ruined his life. When his voice gets in my head, I can’t explain what happens. It’s like he takes over, and I’m a little kid again. Instead of exiting the freeway, I don’t know what came over me. I just kept driving until I reached Michigan. I ended up in a roadside hotel in Grand Rapids. I hadn’t called to tell Sasha where I was, even though I knew she was worried sick. I hated myself. I was just like my dad. He and my mom would get into some major knock-down, drag-out fights, and the next thing I’d know, the door would slam shut and he’d take off. I’d spend hours sitting by the window waiting for him to come back.”

Grant’s eyes were fixed on the ceiling, refusing to meet mine. I tried to imagine what it was like to be Sasha, to have this man’s love one moment and have it be gone the next.

“I had to face the music eventually. I thought she’d be pissed—she had every right to be. Instead, when I told her I didn’t want to be married anymore, she understood. She felt the same way and had some of the same concerns I did, which was why she was always wanting to talk so much about our relationship. I know I did the right thing for both of us, but in the wrong way. You’ve confirmed that I made the right decision, Kim. I mean, we didn’t even meet, we just… collided. In the last few weeks, we’ve shared more intimacy, body and soul, than I ever shared with Sasha. It makes me feel guilty, but also lucky.” He kissed me. “So damn lucky.”

I rolled over to look at him, my head propped on my arm, my fingertip tracing our initials into his chest hair, KH + GD. “So, where do you stand with her now?”

“Well, she ought to hate me, but she’s weirdly fine about it and insists on being friends. She’s actually very grown-up about the whole situation. We see each other all the time at the university.”

“You work together?” I hated the idea of Grant spending time with someone he’d slept with, even if he claimed there was no lingering attraction.

“You know how some people split up and have to keep dealing with each other because they have a kid or a dog? Well, we have the book to finish. It’s under contract with Fordham University Press, and it’s really important for my career, and hers. What I’m saying is that I need you to respect that she’s a necessary part of my life, and she probably always will be. But there’s absolutely nothing between us, I promise.”

“Nothing? You were married to her. You still are.”

“Nothing but friendship. Really, that’s it. It’s like how you describe your relationship with Basil.”

“You’re for real getting divorced?”

He stood up, walked over to his desk, and held up a legal-size manila envelope. “It’s already underway, and it’s costing me a fortune.”

A week later, I met him at his office on the University of Chicago campus to join him for lunch. I saw how his female students lined up to speak with him during office hours, how he loved to joke that Wittgenstein was hiding behind the fireplace with his famous poker. They adored him and laughed at all of his jokes. He was completely clueless that he was real estate with multiple offers, an auction item with several paddles up in the air.

We walked down the hall. I put my hand on his ass, and he stiffened. “What?” I asked. That’s when I saw the nameplate on the closed door: DR. SASHA DUFFY.

Sasha.

Duffy.

And there she sat at her desk. Tiny. Blond. Real. Grant pulled away. “I should go talk to her.”

I ate lunch alone.

Then the phone calls started. We’d get ready to head out for the day and Grant would say, “I have to take this.” He’d disappear into his room, sometimes for hours, leaving me waiting, frustrated and angry and feeling unable to complain. There was always work to be done on their book, and they were obsessed with academia and loved to gossip about people I didn’t know. They spoke about ontology and fuzzy logic, topics that meant little to me.

Sasha had wedged herself between us, not necessarily because she was manipulative or evil, but because we’d allowed her to become entangled in our relationship—me, out of fear that I’d lose Grant if I put too many demands on him, and Grant, because he wasn’t great at saying no to her and, moreover, he liked having two women who loved him. Who wouldn’t?

“Aren’t you jealous?” My friends would ask. I was—although not because they had chemistry. I didn’t see a spark; instead, I saw something I perceived as even more threatening than sex: a deep intellectual fascia that connected them. They weren’t fully unmarried and never would be. I felt I had nothing on Sasha—until I found out I was pregnant.

There was never any question that I’d go through with it. I was emboldened partly because of the discussion Grant and I had had about having a family, and partly because I couldn’t have asked for a better role model of independence than Polly. Not for a second did she doubt that I could be a mother; she didn’t make me feel as if I’d made a mistake. Instead, she said, “If I could do it alone, you can, too.”

“But Burl helped raise me. And I don’t want to do it alone,” I said. “I want us to be a family.” That word seemed too special for me to even say out loud, reserved for other people.

“You get your ideas of family from television sitcoms, Kim. You hardly know the man, and he’s still in cahoots with his wife. You can’t get married anyway, not if you want your alimony, and you’d be a fool to give that up. You don’t even need him. You can end your pregnancy—”

“No, I can’t.”

“Okay, so don’t. It’ll be hard, but you won’t die. You’re not a teenager. Women have been doing this forever.”

I didn’t want having a child to be a solitary experience, but after what Grant had told me about Sasha, I was terrified. “I’m worried he’ll think I trapped him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It takes two to make a baby.”

“But I’m scared to tell him.”

Polly sighed. “Kim, you’re saying that you want stability, and yet this is a man who walked out on his wife when things got hard. What makes you think it’s going to be any different with you?”

I didn’t have a reason why I believed it could be, I only knew that I wanted it to be true. I told Grant I’d meet him near the giraffes at the Lincoln Park Zoo. As he approached, I saw not just my boyfriend but the father of my child, a man whose destiny was now forever intertwined with mine. There we were, surrounded by animals in captivity, and I felt as if I’d built a cage he was about to step into.

His smile was so wide, and for a moment I thought this was going to be okay. I was about to hand him the rattle I’d slipped in my coat pocket when he exclaimed, “You’ll never believe it, Kim! I got the postdoc at UW–Madison after all; the other candidate dropped out.”

“What are you saying?” I dropped his hand. “You’re moving to Madison?”

“I can’t pass it up. It’s a chance to study with some of my heroes, and to teach, finally.”

“Congratulations,” I said halfheartedly. My heart sank.

He lifted my chin with his thumb so I could look him in the eye. “It’s just for a year. We could keep dating long distance, but I can’t stand the thought of being away from you for that long. Will you come with me, Kim? I know we’re new, and it’s a big move, but I want us to do it together.”

In an instant, I knew my answer. I would have gone anywhere with Grant. “We’d love to,” I said.

“Since when did you start speaking in the royal we ?”

I handed him the rattle. On the underside I’d written my due date, October 11, in Sharpie. He looked at me quizzically. I pointed to my stomach.

He rolled the rattle around in his hand as the words poured out of me. “I couldn’t believe it either. I tested three times. It kept coming out positive. My doctor confirmed it.” I tried to read his expression. “I’m keeping it—”

“Yeah, for sure. I mean, you should do what’s best for you.…”

“Best for me?” Why was he speaking to me as if I were a stranger he’d met on the el? I could see that he still hadn’t fully processed the news. He tried to smile, but his eyes were so confused and frightened that I wasn’t sure how to take it. “It’s just, this is happening so fast. I’m not even divorced yet. You’re so sanguine about the prospect of becoming a mother.”

“Sanguine? What does that even mean?”

“Like, you’re okay with it.”

“Oh, believe me, I freaked out, but I’ve had a few more days to process it, I guess.” I paused. “Grant, I thought… I thought you’d be… sanguine, too.”

How had I allowed myself to hope this would play out any differently? I knew it was a shock, and yet, I didn’t count on what happened next. His eyes glassed over. He stared off in the direction of Lake Michigan and suddenly it seemed as if he weren’t there anymore. “I’m sorry.” He kissed my forehead. He began to walk away from me in the stunned manner of someone who’d been in a terrible accident.

“Grant?”

He didn’t respond.

“Grant, are you just going to walk away?”

He didn’t walk—he picked up his pace and began to run, and with every step I could hear the rattle shaking in his hand. He ran through chunks of old, dirty snow and melting puddles, past all those animals napping and grazing, barely looking up as he went past.

Then he was gone.

Shattered, I walked back to my apartment in stunned silence. I was too shocked for tears and too sad to be angry. How did that happen? One minute he was asking me to move to Madison with him, the next, he was gone.

A few miserable hours later, my phone rang. I’d left some desperate messages for Basil to call me back and was hoping it might be him; he had always been there for me. Instead, it was a woman’s voice on the line. “Kim? Don’t hang up. I know we haven’t met. This is Sasha.”

How could my day get any more uncomfortable? Was she going to stake her claim on Grant, tell me to back off? “Why are you calling me?”

“I know, I’m probably the last person you thought you’d hear from. Look, I’m at Grant’s. He asked me to come over. He told me about…” I could hear the pain in her voice, but I could also hear the kindness. “Well, he told me everything.”

I clutched the phone so hard it could have shattered in my hand. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

“I know you don’t. Did he tell you about what happened to him when he was a kid?”

“Just that his dad ran off and died, and his stepfather was kind of a milquetoast.”

“I guess that’s the high-level version.” Here I was deeply in love and pregnant, and I felt she was making a point that I knew little about him. She wasn’t wrong.

“His parents were so young when they had him. His dad got drunk and took off all the time, and his mom started drinking, too. They got into some epic fights. Lather, rinse, repeat—well, until Richard wrapped his car around a tree and never came home again. His mom hit the bottle pretty hard after that, and she didn’t do the best job taking care of Grant, at least for a while. He’s a good guy, he is, but he can’t deal with conflict, and he’d rather be the one who leaves than gets left, if that makes sense.”

“I guess?”

“It was hard for me to hear your news. But I know that, as a woman, you must be pretty damn scared right now. And as Grant’s friend, I know he’s scared, too. He’s a good guy, he really is. He’s just been through lots of turmoil. He’s not the kind of man who would ditch you in your… situation.”

“But, Sasha, he ditched you. ”

“We weren’t working. I knew we didn’t have a future, and so did he. It was different. I’ve already got a new boyfriend. I’ve moved on, and so has he, obviously.”

She didn’t sound like someone who was emotionally unstable; she didn’t sound needy. She sounded kind and generous. Did I not know the whole story, or had Grant misrepresented their relationship? Did he have a low bar for neediness? Did he build up his side of the story so he wouldn’t scare me away?

She said, “Will you come talk to him? He feels terrible. You’ll both feel better.”

By the time I got to his apartment, she was gone. Grant greeted me with a tearful embrace that I needed so badly I almost forgot how angry and upset I’d been. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He stroked my hair, ran the back of his index finger down my cheek. “You must have felt—”

“I did, Grant. I felt as bad as you thought I could feel, and worse. I thought you left me the way you left Sasha. I thought I was going to have to deal with this all alone. I’ve never felt so shitty or so scared. Never. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I know. But you have to believe me, you’re the one. I knew it the minute we met. And your news was a total surprise, although we were pretty careless, so it shouldn’t have been. Things aren’t lining up the way they usually do, but we’re adults. We’re smart and we’re in love, and we can do this. Come to Madison. We’ll have this baby and make such a beautiful life together.”

Part of me was still standing at the zoo, watching Grant’s back as he ran away. The other part could hear Sasha’s voice in my ears.

“Listen to me. This is crazy but wonderful. We’re off to a wobbly start but we’ll right ourselves. You are not in this alone. Forgive me. Please?”

I did forgive him, but forgiving and forgetting are two different things.

If I hadn’t been pregnant, we might have moved slower, talked through things more, seen a couples counselor. Instead, shocked by first a positive pregnancy test, then the revelation that we were having twins, we were plunged into an entirely new future.

It turned out that Sasha was good at talking Grant through his issues when I was too stressed or exhausted. Again and again, Grant turned to her, and I turned to Basil. We outsourced our emotional needs to our exes, never fully showing the messiest parts of ourselves to each other.

Sasha became even more entwined with our lives when she took a tenure-track job at College of the Mounds, an hour away from us, and then he started working there. On campus, everyone thought they were married because she’d taken his name. She had Grant during the week, and I had him on the weekends. I told myself that it was for the best. With Grant gone part of the time, there was less risk of upsetting his delicate equilibrium.

People talk about open relationships, and in some ways that’s what we had all these years, albeit without sex. I came to appreciate Sasha’s role in maintaining Grant’s well-being and felt lucky, even, that I didn’t have to be everything to him, even as I sometimes resented that her presence was so necessary. We were both good for Grant. I could be a lot like Polly. I didn’t have patience for wallowing when he was down, and I soon learned that I could off-load some of that emotional labor to Sasha, who was a more sympathetic sounding board, particularly when it came to his academic concerns.

She’d gone through a series of boyfriends over the decades. And then, about a year before the college closed, Sasha fell in love with Matthias, a visiting sociology professor from Germany. He had a clear-eyed view of Grant and Sasha’s relationship that we’d normalized. He said they were “enmeshed,” and while he felt for Grant, he made clear that boundaries needed to be erected, even before their big move over the summer. Grant wouldn’t say so, but losing constant access to Sasha was harder for him than losing his job. “After thirty years, you finally broke up,” I joked—although I wasn’t really joking.

I realized that I couldn’t text Sasha with this news; I had to call. She seemed surprised to hear from me, and before I could lose my nerve, I blurted out that Grant was missing, that he’d gone off for a hike and hadn’t come home. I explained that a search was underway, and it was all over the news, and that the whole situation was incredibly scary and dramatic. “You know him, Sash. Do you really think he could have gotten lost?”

In the space of her pause, I clutched the phone and felt my stomach churn.

“No.” She said this with the certainty of someone who had been waiting for me to ask her that question for her entire life. And for the first time, I felt she was wrong, and that I was the one who knew Grant better.

“But he’s never been gone this long before,” I said. “And he’s really into hiking now.” It sounded as if I was pleading with her. “I really think he might be lost.”

“He’s not lost, Kim.”

“He’s different. He’s changed since we’ve arrived. We’ve changed. We were… we were really good.”

“That’s great.” Her enthusiasm was forced, and she sounded skeptical. “I mean, not if he’s truly missing in the mountains. But change is good, that’s what we’ve all needed. I’m focusing on my own life, which means I need to be less tied up in Grant’s drama.”

“But aren’t you worried? He could die up there.”

She took a sharp breath, the kind you take when you’re trying to prevent yourself from saying something too harsh. “He runs when he’s scared, Kim. He always comes back. I’m sorry, but I can’t be part of this anymore.”

“I wasn’t asking you to be part of anything,” I stammered. “I was asking—”

Her words were harsh, but she was not unkind. “Grant is fine. He’s always fine. But he’s not my problem anymore, Kim. You either need to be his safe space and marry him, finally—or you need to walk away.”