Vladimir(20)
“I know all about migraines,” I said. “I had them until I was around forty-five. The whole world would be insufferable.” This was not true—I had bad headaches, but I never had migraines, never had the refracting of light that people describe, the spots, the auras—but I wanted to insist on our similarities.
“I didn’t have a migraine,” she said. “The truth is that Vlad and I had an awful fight and I couldn’t get down from the ceiling after. He had to drug me and put me to bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know all about fights, too.”
“I sometimes have migraines,” she said. “I think. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that.”
“What was the fight about, if you don’t mind me asking—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” There was a fantasy that flashed into my mind quickly—as quickly and intrusively as those horrid images that used to haunt me as a young woman, of shit being thrown in my face or a rapist stuffing my used maxi pad into my mouth to gag me—of her telling me that the fight was about me, about Vladimir’s lust for me. No, fool. I pushed the thought from my mind as immediately as I would push back those other images.
“I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “That’s why I came here. To tell you. Do you know I’ve read both your novels? I loved them. I wasn’t going to tell you I read them. But I want to know you, and I want you to know me. Do you think that’s strange? But we’re working together and now my daughter has swum in your pool and I didn’t come and it was so rude and I want you to know why. Listen. I’m going to be frank.” She paused and leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m kind of a fuckup.”
“Me too.” I said to her. I had not expected, when I saw Cynthia sitting quietly in the faculty meetings, that she would be like this. I had been prejudiced—not against her being Chinese American, although who knows what assumptions were lingering unconsciously in my mind. I had been prejudiced because she was a wife. A hanger-on. I was a wife too, but my husband and I were hired for tenure-track positions at the same time. We made equal salaries until he became chair. I sold my first book for an advance that allowed us to make a down payment on our home. This woman, teaching one class, had moved with her husband, parasitic and helpless.
But here in my office, she impressed me. Not because she had liked my novels, but because there was an intense desperation to her, as though after all that she had gone through, the last stop on the train for her was truth, and the pursuit of truth.
She told me what I expected, that when Vladimir had suggested she text to coordinate lunch, she had bristled and told him she wouldn’t let the first text she wrote to me concern food. She told him to check with me about towels, because they only had slightly stained white bath towels, and she would have to go to the store and get new ones. She told me that she had gone to a spa to get her legs and underarms waxed to prepare and had bought new bathing suits for herself and Phee. She told me she was so nervous that morning that she was snappy and irritable. When Vlad, after one snap too many, snapped back, she broke down in tears and told him that all she wanted was to show us, me a writer, and my husband—an academic mind she admired—that they were a normal family. (She took a detour to say that she had fucked a couple teachers during her undergraduate and graduate experience, and while in general, looking at the drawn and papery skin that pulled toward their penises, or their crinkled eyes in morning light, she found them sad, she felt herself to be free and aware enough of the dynamic between them and was disappointed in women these days whose first thought after a consensual love affair was of their trauma—me, she said, I know trauma.)
“Vlad is so sick of my moods, he’s so fed up with my ‘mental health’,” she continued. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “I’m sick of it too. I’m fucking sick of it.” Her voice rose with a soft press of emotion that she swallowed. “So then he told me that you already knew we weren’t a normal family—that everyone knew—and then he told me—I didn’t know this—I didn’t know this until Saturday—I sat in faculty meetings and fucking potlucks and I didn’t know this—he told me that he told the hiring committee about my suicide attempt.” She stopped herself. “Were you there?”
“I was not,” I said, “but—” I lowered my head, hesitating.
“You heard.”
“I heard.”
She turned and looked out at the view again. “He said that’s probably why he got the job, because when they asked him why he wanted to move all the way up here, something set him off and he started crying, and it all came out in a burst, and he told them how I had tried to kill myself when our child wasn’t yet one year old, and how his responsibility was now to keep me alive, and they could hire me, that I was brilliant, that we were still living in the same apartment where he had found me foaming at the mouth, having shit myself in the bedroom, with a note to keep my daughter away.”
At this I might have made a slight noise, because she glanced over to me as though daring me to say something. I held her gaze and nodded slightly, and she turned back to the window.
“I was surprised when they hired me for the memoir-writing class. It’s not like a college to just—offer a job. Maybe I should have guessed. He said that when he left he felt ashamed of himself—so unprofessional—but after so many rejections, the offer came within the week.” She paused and shook her head. “I mean, students are on that committee, right?”