Everything You Want Me to Be(34)

It was time for HollyG to meet LitGeek.





PETER / October 2007


RUNNING WAS the best part of my day because it let me forget. There was something about the balance of the quiet land against a cadence of steady footfalls that wiped every higher thought from my head. I regularly jogged the lake trails in Minneapolis, and after we moved here I started running the back roads by the farm until I found a better route. I joined the Pine Valley High School cross-country team.

Not officially, of course. One of the math teachers coached the team and he tried to rope me into the assistant coach job, but there was no way in hell I was giving up every Saturday morning from now until Thanksgiving for their meets. I just ran with the boys. They knew every shortcut and trail in a thirty-mile radius and on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school we tackled the country, a small herd of humans trekking by pastures where cows chewed and stared. Most of the kids looked like I had in high school—awkward and sunburnt and hollow between their bones—but they understood endurance through uneven terrain. We practiced hills between rows of corn and did laps on freshly harvested fields full of soft dirt. We sprinted the easy straights on the football field to practice getting the lead position early and ran the trail around Lake Crosby dozens of times to work on maneuvering on a confined path. Most of them tried to pass each other where the trail opened up by the abandoned barn and it became a joke, all of them tensing as we approached it, grinning and preparing for the mad dash to the front. I stayed at the back to encourage the stragglers, saying things like, “Pacing, pacing,” “It’s not about tempo, it’s about effort,” and “Keep it up. Don’t lose sight of it.”

I would forget.

I’d run for miles, measuring my breaths, feeling my calves burn and then go numb, and watch the wide, empty horizon with a feeling of utter happiness. Her words would filter through like raindrops, unconnected to anything, and quench something inside me, a bone-deep aridity I’d barely let myself acknowledge.

And I would forget what a complete sack of shit I was.

I was cheating on my wife.

I tried to rationalize it most of the time, telling myself I hadn’t even met HollyG. She was just a screen name, an internet Siren. Was my increasing fixation with her functionally any different from buying a Penthouse?

I knew her completely and yet not at all. I could say exactly how she’d feel about any given book or play, what her favorite drink was, why she hated reality TV, the kind of people that made her nervous. Yet I didn’t know her face, her age, her weight, or her life. She could be divorced with six kids. She could be waiting on a job transfer so she could leave her husband. How could I be cheating with someone I couldn’t pick out in a lineup?

Yes, we’d had sex. Three times. It was cyber sex, though. What was the difference between that and one of Elsa’s romance novels? There was no one I could ask, no one I trusted besides HollyG, and when I did break down and ask her one day, she told me that everyone cheats in their heart and she was happy to tell me that I wasn’t any better than anyone else. I laughed, of course, but answered that I was more worried about being worse than everyone else. Then she said something I’ll never forget. She waited a long time to respond before she wrote, “You’re no worse than me. That’s all that matters.”

God, I was euphoric when I saw those words. Absolutely euphoric in a way only a complete sack of shit can be. I read her reply a dozen times, loving how she paired us together in a few simple phrases, how we had become the only ruler against which the other could be measured. You’re no worse than me, she said. So she was married, too. It made it somehow better, to know that she was as culpable as I was, that even our sins were compatible.

I locked myself in the spare room upstairs, telling Mary and Elsa that I was grading papers and developing lesson plans.

“How many lessons do you need for those kids?” Elsa asked me one night as I was clearing the table and preparing my exit.

“It’s a lot of work the first year. I’m starting from scratch and I’ve got six classes with different ages and abilities, not to mention teaching for the standardized tests. I have to go in with a game plan every day.”

“But it’s Friday, isn’t it?” Elsa looked to Mary for confirmation, who nodded silently while scooping the leftover potatoes onto a scarred metal tray that she always set outside after dinner for the barn cats. Since the chicken butchering day, she’d said less and less to me, and nothing that mattered.

“All the more reason to get a jump on it.” I grabbed a Coke from the fridge and ducked out of the kitchen before she could inquire further. I should’ve asked Mary if I could help wash the dishes or what she wanted us to do over the weekend, anything that would tamp down the raging guilt that raced through me every time I looked at her during the last month, but she seemed to want nothing from me, as if my total incompetence as a farmer had excluded me from every other area of her life. I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t try to reach her anymore, and as I shut the door to the spare room and logged onto my computer, I actually felt somewhat justified—complete bastard that I was—because she had turned away from me first. Mary was the one who’d left our marriage for someone else, and when HollyG found me in that forum I was desperate. Every night I’d been searching for first editions, signed copies, and rare or out-of-print books. It was my knee-jerk reaction to loss, ever since my parents’ divorce when I was ten. It wasn’t only the escape that attracted me; it was the predictability. Books were finite, a world contained between two covers that could be repeated as many times as I turned the first page. No matter how much misery Tolstoy unleashed or how often Chuck Palahniuk’s characters fucked their lives up, their stories became charted, inevitable. I could count on them. Lonely and hungering for connection, I went searching for books. What I found was something else entirely.