The Fixed Stars Read online

  Nice, I say, and force a smile. My right eyelid twitches from squinting.

  Cool, she says, like a normal person. She smiles back.

  I’ve wanted this moment, thought about it for a week, but staying put takes effort. The sun is so bright that it stings, a warning heat. My eyelid is spasming wildly now.

  It was nice to meet you, I manage. Maybe I’ll see you around.

  She nods, still smiling. Thanks again, she says. She’s already pivoting on her heel, back to her client.

  I turn fast, hoping she hasn’t seen whatever my eyelid is doing, what my whole face must be doing. I aim myself at the bus stop and start moving, who am I? who am I? who am I?, all the way down the street.

  When I get there, I’ve missed the bus, and the next won’t come for fifteen minutes. I rest my tote bag between my ankles and lean my shoulder against the steel frame of the bus shelter, hoping to steady the twitch in my gut. There’s a crowd of homeless men in front of the building across the street, their backs against its stone facade. I wonder if the stone feels cool in this heat. They must have been out here all day, while we sat in air conditioning. While I am forming this thought, Nora walks past them. She’s slung her jacket over her shoulder, and a soft-sided briefcase hangs at her hip. She lowers herself onto an empty bench at the bus stop opposite mine. Her hair looks stringy with sweat, and there’s a shadow under her eyes. She hasn’t noticed me. I don’t know what I’d do if she did. I look at the pavement.

  My bus arrives. In case Nora has seen me, I make a show of my eagerness to leave, my detachment from the past week. I lock my eyes onto the bus door as it passes me, swivel my head extravagantly to follow it to the curb. I am a stage actor in a play about a bus stop. I step up through the folding doors and take the first open seat on the street side, where I can still see her. She’s put in her earbuds now, leans forward, lets her hair hang. The bus lurches away from the sidewalk, and I watch her get smaller and smaller, until she disappears into the glare.

  I could have yelled to Nora when I saw her. I could have caught her eye. Or she could have seen me, yelled to me across the street. There’s a poem by Wisława Szymborska, “Could Have,” about chance, fortune, and the flukes that often decide life and death. It begins, “It could have happened. / It had to happen. / It happened earlier. Later. / Nearer. Farther off. / It happened, but not to you.”1

  In another iteration, I could have lived it differently. In some other life, I could have stood next to her in a photo.

  But what about Brandon? What about June? I swing like a pendulum from sadness to relief, sadness to relief. A disaster averted; it could have happened, but it didn’t.

  The bus is nearing my stop, and I yank the cord. I step out onto the sidewalk. The air is still warm, barely perceptible where it touches my arms. Brandon’s car rumbles at the curb, and I open the door and climb in.

  I told Brandon about the trial, but I didn’t tell him about Nora. I decided not to.

  The next morning, I woke up thinking about her, and the morning after that. I allowed myself to do what I hadn’t during the trial: I searched for her online. It didn’t take long to find her last name, along with a couple of photographs. Her smile was disorienting, like being blindfolded and spun around. I thought of a friend who’d suffered a recent bout of vertigo, how he described that these tiny mineral crystals from one part of his inner ear had wound up in another part, a wrong part, so that when he looked down, they’d roll around and trick his brain into thinking the floor had tilted. Nora’s smile did that to me. It located a feeling where it wasn’t supposed to be, turned the room on end.

  In a book on amateur astronomy, I read that if you can identify Orion and the Big Dipper, you can use them as guideposts to find every major star and constellation visible from the Northern Hemisphere, no matter the season or time of night.

  I had found my stars. I had Brandon. I had June. I had love. I had only to redirect my focus, surely that was it: look at them, look at us, look at me. I knew who I was in this constellation, beside my two people.

  I know how to stop this.

  I could interrogate my feelings for Nora into oblivion. But the questions that had once been persuasive seemed useless now. Then, I’d had the perspective of experience to draw on. I’d had relationships with men, enough to allow me to generalize, extrapolate, connect the dots into shapes. Here I had nothing. I’d never been with a woman. What if the view would be different there—different in ways I couldn’t imagine, like the view from a galaxy a billion light-years away? Constellations, after all, are a trick of perspective.

  My friend Matthew and I often meet up to work together, and one afternoon at his apartment, I tell him about Nora.

  Have you talked to Brandon about this? he asks. He’s doing this thing where he talks slowly, pointedly, so serious he almost overdoes it, as though he might burst into tears.

  Not yet, I say. I’m kind of afraid to.

  I think you have to.

  He tells me about his relationship with his wife of twenty-three years, how they talk about their crushes sometimes, how hot the conversations can be. We’re talking about different things.

  I know, I say. I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with a crush. It could be a fun thing, hypothetically, in my marriage. I know this is an option. I could use it as fuel, something to bring home and burn, let both of us feel its heat.

  But this isn’t that, I say. That’s what scares me. I don’t want to share this with Brandon.

  I invite another friend to lunch. I need to tell someone else, see what another person says.

  Have you talked to Brandon? she asks.

  I was hoping you’d say something else, I say.

  This is normal, you know, she says. I’ll bet Brandon will think this is normal too. She reminds me that she dated girls in high school, that she and a female friend hooked up in their early twenties, kissed, shared beds. Now she’s married to a man, happily married, with two sons. It’s all part of her. It’s normal. It’s okay. She draws out the last syllable, throws her weight into it.

  Brandon went to Oberlin College, ran with a crowd of musicians and artists. I remember him marveling once, stupefied, when I told him I’d never kissed a woman. I was the only girl he knew who hadn’t. It wasn’t that his female friends weren’t straight or that they were gay. It was simpler than all that. Even he’d kissed a male friend once, at a party, to try it. It was just fooling around. Who is the fool here? I wonder.

  A friend’s mother has a small vacation house on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride from Seattle, and we were invited for the Fourth of July. That afternoon, a bunch of us swam out to a diving platform a dozen yards from the shore. The water of the Sound is icy on even the hottest days of summer, and this was the first time I’d ever put my whole body into it, swimming and not just wading. I felt awake for the first time in weeks. Brandon paddled out to us in a kayak, cheering.

  At June’s naptime, she followed me up the carpeted stairs to a bedroom under the eaves. I lay down with her, still in my swimsuit. It was damp, itchy, but I didn’t want to get up. I lay there and thought of a trip with my parents when I was six or seven, a few years older than June. We were in La Jolla, at the beach, and I hated it: the sand, the blaze of the sun, the sunscreen. My mother had a yellow terrycloth cover-up that was styled like a blazer, marigold-colored with thick plastic buttons and shoulder pads, and she gave it to me to put on. I fell asleep in it on the sand. The fabric on the inside was ticklish, its loops of thread rubbing my Coppertoned back like the rough side of a dish sponge. But I liked its weight across my shoulders, a weight that meant protection. I liked the way its warmth was different from the sun’s warmth. It was my mother’s heat.

  Now I curled around my child’s sleeping body, her arms soft and solid as water balloons. Stay, I said to myself, stay here. There is nowhere else.

  I wondered where Nora was.

  In the bathroom, I peeled off my swimsuit and dragged a comb through my hai
r. I listened to the voices rising through the ductwork from the kitchen. I’m torturing myself with a hypothetical, I said aloud to no one.

  It was a few days later, maybe the eighth of July, 2015, when I told Brandon about Nora. We were lying side by side in bed, on top of the blankets, too hot to get underneath. In the light from my bedside lamp, the wall beyond our feet glowed the color of cooked mushrooms.

  I have to talk to you about something, I said. I was looking at the ceiling. He’d been scrolling on his phone, and now he tossed it onto the blanket.

  Yeah? he said. Okay.

  I’m scared to talk to you about it, I said. My eyes burned.

  Okay, he said, more slowly this time.

  I’ve been avoiding it.

  It’s okay, he said. He was kind.

  When I had jury duty, I said, I kept looking at one of the attorneys. This woman in a men’s suit. Now I can’t stop thinking about her.

  Why’s that a big deal? he asked. He said it easily, like it really was the first thought that came to his mind. Like he wasn’t worried.

  It just is.

  Why? Nobody’s totally straight, right? We’re all on a spectrum.

  I didn’t answer. I had thought I was straight. Straight enough to not think about whether I was straight.

  I guess, I said. I don’t know. This feels weird.

  It’s okay.

  It doesn’t feel okay.

  This is normal, he said. You know I’ve had crushes too.

  But this doesn’t feel normal. This doesn’t feel like that.

  Have you even talked to her?

  I talked to her a little bit on the last day.

  What do you know about her?

  Her name is Nora. She’s a writer too.

  Is that all you know? How do you know you like her?

  I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

  Why are you crying? he asked.

  I’m so scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me, I said.

  I don’t understand why you’re scared.

  Because I can’t stop thinking about her! My voice was rising. I said, It’s not going away.

  The trial ended barely a week ago, he said.

  But I don’t like this, I said. I can’t stop. I’m making myself miserable.

  I turned away, onto my side. Down the street, an engine grunted to life. The left side of my body felt strangely heavy, as though it were sending down tentacles, boring through the bed to the floor.

  Do you need to do something about this? he said.

  No.

  But you’ve never been with a woman. You never even tried it. Do you need to?

  No, I said. I rolled onto my back again, let my fist find the blanket between us. I said, I’m afraid if I do, I’ll burn down our marriage.

  He made a noise, and then I knew he was crying. It sounded like he was breathing underwater.

  I can’t, I said.

  When I’d imagined this conversation, when I’d played it out in my head, it hadn’t gone this way. When I’d conjured up Brandon, I’d gotten him all wrong. This is the kind of wife you are? I’d heard him scream. This is the kind of person you are? We’ve been married for eight years. We’ve been together for ten. And this is who you turn out to be? In his place, I would not have been kind.

  But he was. Now I’d made him cry, and I knew he was crying not only for himself but also for me. He was crying with me. We were both afraid, of the same thing and of very different things.

  Are you going to leave me? he asked.

  No, I said, and I believed it.

  I don’t want you to leave me, he said.

  We both cried. I wasn’t alone with it anymore: he was with me. We had a shared secret. We would carry it, we would interrogate it, we would outlast it. We.

  We lay there, not talking, not fighting. I turned off the lamp, and he rolled to face the wall. I shimmied toward him, slid my arm under his. The smooth skin inside my elbow found the smooth skin of his waist. His skin was like June’s.

  2

  Brandon and I met in April 2005, the spring that I was twenty-six. He was twenty-three, eleven months out of college, in his first year of graduate school at Brooklyn College. He was a formally trained saxophonist, now getting a master’s in music composition. I was in grad school too, for anthropology, and I worked part-time for a university press in downtown Seattle. We were drawn together from the start by a love of food and cooking. I’d been writing a food blog for a few months, and a friend of his told him about it, jokingly playing matchmaker. He read it and sent me an email. He was in New York, and I was in Seattle, but we had credit cards. We’d deal with the consequences later. The first time we kissed was in the kitchen of my apartment, against the closed door of the dishwasher in mid-cycle. Everything whirred.

  Food was a hobby that we’d each put to use in short-term jobs and odd gigs to get us through college and after. He’d worked at Pizza Hut, had done some catering, was a server at Balthazar in New York City. I’d also worked for a caterer, and as a restaurant cook, though the stress and pressure of a professional kitchen quickly spun me back out the door. Instead I sold olive oil at a greenmarket and made sandwiches at Whole Foods, reading M. F. K. Fisher like a sacred scroll. The best job I ever had, I told Brandon giddily, was a summer as a cheese monger. He got it.

  I’d never felt so perfectly matched. He was smart in all the ways that I wasn’t. I knew the lyrics to songs, but he actually knew how to make them. I remember when he played me Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.” I’d never heard it before, but I thought right away that he rose to meet the world the same way the song does: light and quick, with an intensity that revealed itself in glimmers, caught me up and made me feel things.

  Brandon was easy to like and easy to love. While I was at work, he’d set off on foot or by bus or in my car and find places I’d never heard of. He bought me a funny vintage book about etiquette and a dozen slices of culatello wrapped in aluminum foil. He was a city creature, unintimidated by new places and people. I liked visiting him in New York, letting him lead me around the city. He was a whistler, I discovered. He whistled everywhere he went. Sometimes he even sang, a phrase of Caetano Veloso or Curtis Mayfield. What I love about New York is that no one cares, he said, squeezing my hand.

  I was quietly crazed with love for him, the way a ceramic bowl is crazed with fine cracks and lines. I felt like I could split open at any moment and it would all spill out, the jelly of my insides, like the alien in a sci-fi movie who looks like a woman but in the act of love is revealed to be a glowing column of light.

  He’s so good, I’d say to friends, catching them up on my news. I wanted to learn from him.

  His parents had been hippies, he told me. His mother had given him dolls and trucks, and he’d played soccer and saxophone and taken dance classes. His parents had tried to raise him without gender bias, and as an adolescent, he wanted to join a ballet company one day. I’d never known someone like him.

  My mother hoped I’d wind up a gay, ballet-dancing rock star, he laughed. She was disappointed when I turned out to be straight.

  Of course, there were things I wasn’t sure about. We lived on opposite sides of the country and knew each other in a once-a-month-visit kind of way. He also fantasized frequently about robbing a bank and what he could do with the money. Usually these were altruistic, Robin Hood–y fantasies, which was charming, but they were disturbingly elaborate. It didn’t seem very fun to me, daydreaming about something illicit that I didn’t want to do. Tomato, tomahto?

  Once, visiting his parents in New Jersey, we borrowed their car and went out to dinner. It was late summer, the end of a hot and torpid day, and Brandon half-assed his parallel-parking job. The wheels were three and a half feet from the curb, if not four, and when I suggested that he repark, he scoffed. If I get a ticket, he said, I’ll just pay it. I huffed the whole way to the restaurant. We’ll never share a bank account, I scolded. I don’t want you using my money for a parking ticket
you could have avoided.

  He had a tendency to talk in absolutes, offering opinions and judgments with an air of immutable fact. He was prone to exaggerations and boasts. I didn’t like how big and loud he got, how he stopped listening. I’m from New Jersey! he’d explain. This is how people are in Jersey! I bit my lip. I grew up in Oklahoma—what did I know? It was easier to give in.

  I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to care about and what I was supposed to brush off. I’d dated around, had had one long-term boyfriend. I had enough experience to know that relationships—even romantic ones, especially romantic ones—require compromise. But what could, and should, I compromise on? How does anyone know?

  I’d seen movies, read magazines and novels and Cathy cartoons. I’d heard groups of women talk shit about men—men always this, men always that—as though men were a unified, homogeneous category, and I’d heard groups of men do the same. It made me queasy. Even people who seemed to be happily partnered talked shit about their significant other in private. How much annoyance with one’s partner is normal? A lot of people seem to barely tolerate the person they love. Is that normal? If it is normal, is it okay with me, in my life?

  Which compromises could I live with and which would fester, rise up between us like a wall? How could I know—and know right now—which attributes were important? What could I live with, for the sake of us? How does anyone know? I was happy with Brandon. Was that enough?

  The following spring, on a sunny late-March day in Brooklyn, we sat down on a bench beside the East River and he slid suddenly to his knees and pulled out a ring. I said yes and quietly panicked, bewildered and ecstatic, a collision of feelings that felt very sane. We were twenty-four and twenty-seven. We’d been together for eleven months and four days, though we’d lived on opposite coasts for every day of it. We held hands and walked on the waterfront, stopping in a chocolate shop we’d read about. We tossed back and forth dates and locations and daydreams and the question of where we would live. There was another question I remember not saying aloud: How will we handle our money? I couldn’t make my mouth form the phrase. It was too unsexy, unromantic, anxious. I didn’t believe that getting married was supposed to be some blissful state of suspended animation, but I wanted to be elated, swept up, careless. I wanted to be transformed. I wanted to be able to be someone else, even just for a day, maybe a week or two.