Travels in Vermeer (20 page)

She insisted I call her Maggie, and sat me down in her office cluttered with wire baskets piled with forms and folders, space heater on the floor. “Excuse the mess,” she said. “Part of my job is to run the Sunday school.” I found a perch on a metal stacking chair. Nothing was as I'd expected: instead of the beatific matron in habit, here was a woman in camel cardigan, braids pinned neatly above her ears.

“Michael, how did you meet your wife?”

And so I told her the story about the cabin in Steamboat Springs, about the plumbing. It was almost like living it all again. I suddenly remembered leaning into the crumbling earthen bank beneath the floor, trying to get a grip on the old iron couplings with a ten-pound pipe wrench clanking in my hands, dirt and sweat in my eyes. The pipes in those cabins always ice-burst in the dead of winter, though I wouldn't discover it until I tried to turn on the water at the beginning of summer. The image of Jackie's face, staring incredulously down at me through a hole in a bathroom floor. “Hullo?” she'd said.

“Oh hi … I'll be done in a minute.”

Maggie giggled, schoolgirl-style.

“Where did you go for your first date?”

I recalled driving the battered flatbed up the canyon road to Fish Creek Falls—the sense that this lady, this elegant, olive-skinned lady in slacks didn't belong in such a vehicle, in such a place, with such a driver (I spent those summers in straw hat, jeans, torn-off sleeves). But here she was: smiling, her dark eyes shining, smoking a Virginia Slims extravagantly out the passenger window. She was having the time of her life. Standing on the cantilever footbridge at the base of the falls, she marveled at the height of it, the boulder-broken roar of it, cool veil of spray directly in our faces. I kept wondering if being here, being with me was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks thing for her. I recited Bishop's twenty-line poem, “Sandpiper.” This was everything,
she
was everything I had never dared to want, and when we kissed in the mist of the falls, we already knew how lucky we were.

“How long before you got married?”

I told her about “living in sin,” about the idyllic years in grad school—poetry readings, parties, black box theatre—and tried to summarize year by year. How proud I was of her, the sense of self-containment: all we really needed was each other. Jackie's brilliance, the way she excelled at almost everything. The whole while I talked, I gazed out over the low roofs of Walnut Street, the stark Missouri sky above. It was my life I was looking at, scenes from my childhood mixed in with scenes with Jackie. I tried to explain. When I was thirteen, the six of us—my recently separated mom and all five kids—would ride our bikes, in single file,
here
on Sunday morning … three boys in blazers with clip-on ties or dickies, the girls in their summer dresses. A “mother hen with five little chicks,” as someone at Mass described it. As reward, on the way home, our mother would buy us all cherry phosphates at Glenview Drug. We were never more a family than on those Sunday mornings. I hadn't stepped foot in Sacred Heart since then.

“I'm starting to wonder about myself,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well, I won't touch Jackie's things. And I hear her in the house. She's with me,” I said. “One day, as I was working in the study, I saw a beautiful red fox loping straight toward me, across the golf course, tongue lolling to one side, and I cried out: ‘Jackie! Look!'”

“Yes, she is with you,” said Maggie.

“Michael,” she added, “Nothing we do for each other is in vain. I believe love is eternal.” Then she said, “And she'll
always
be with you.” And there was no trace of striving in her tone: it was casual, matter-of-fact.

After a moment, she asked about my “spiritual quest”; she mentioned that, besides the school, she ran the RCIA program—the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults—at Sacred Heart, and invited me to attend an “inquiry session.” In case I was curious.

I didn't mind that she asked me this; I could see no reason to mind.

I went to the meetings for a few weeks, and enjoyed them. Two days before my lease ran out, I emptied Jackie's dressers and closets, piled the mink coats in the bed of my truck, and poured the contents of jewelry boxes into a bushel basket. Real pearls, braids of gold and diamonds mixed in with handfuls of the baroque costume jewelry she'd collected for the stage. I drove to the Salvation Army, dumped it all in the center of the concrete floor—much to the astonishment of the volunteers—and walked away. That afternoon, I packed a U-Haul trailer, and before sunrise, I hit the on-ramp back toward Utah.

All that year, it felt like I had the strength of two—almost an unearthly strength. I'd hike back into the desert wilderness for weeks, sometimes. I could draw unemployment in the city without a trace of shame, and did. In springtime, 1992, I finished RCIA at the Newman Center in Salt Lake, was baptized, and found joy in the process. By fall, when the academic year began again, I was back at the University, wrapping up my doctorate. Then the book was out, and I started interviewing for jobs. More importantly, I was free— at least for the time being—free of self-doubts, of second-guessing my personal worth or what I could do for others. And the truth is, Maggie was right; Jackie has always been with me.

3. Sara

I first met Sara in 1991, before Jackie died. I was teaching that fall semester at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. I'd taken the job, a simple sabbatical replacement, because Jackie had urged me to take it. She saw it as a first step toward my profession; she was probably right about that. Her one and only goal in those weeks, as the cancer rapidly overtook her, was to make it to Christmas. She didn't make it to Thanksgiving. Each day, I drove sixty miles to teach my courses in Fulton, and then back to Columbia to take my place at Jackie's side. When Jackie passed, I took only three days off, and then finished out the semester. I felt I needed the human contact, the normalcy.

Sara was a Freshman Composition student of mine that semester. Here is virtually everything I remember of her then. She had gorgeous, liquid-brown eyes. She set up three required conferences with me to discuss her work, but each time, when I took the precious hour or two away from Jackie to meet, Sara didn't show up. This didn't go over well with me, and besides, I'd told the class that I'd count missed conferences as absences. I gave her a B+ for a final grade. I considered the B+ generous; she was very young, after all.

In April 1998, a five-page letter arrived from Sara, addressed to “Professor Mike White, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.” Somehow, it found me at UNC-Wilmington. I'd nearly forgotten her. She was finishing a master's degree in voice at the University of Missouri, and attending a summer residency at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On the last page, she wondered if we could meet. And because, that spring, I happened to be passing through Greensboro for a reading in Asheville, we did meet. I had a strangely awkward lunch on that rather prim campus with an anxious and long-limbed beauty. I was confused, but went to my reading, came back on Sunday as I passed through again, and we had another awkward lunch, club sandwiches at a nearby restaurant. I sent a salad back that came with the wrong dressing, and for some reason, this action made Sara seem very anxious. She later told me it made me seem demanding. By the end of that lunch I thought I probably shouldn't see her again. The age difference seemed too pronounced. It was a mistake, I thought.

But when I was dropping her off at her dorm, she suggested we go for a walk by a nearby pond. We ambled into a sheltered grove, and she stopped and turned toward me, smiling. I asked if I could kiss her, and she—amused that I had asked—said yes. I kissed her, passionately but respectfully, and there she showed me such strength of desire I wouldn't have suspected.

On her first visit to Wilmington, we spent a whole weekend on the beach. I sat, half delirious, watching her dash in and out of the jade-green waves in a tiny, black string-bikini. We made out for hours in the moonlit dunes, but didn't yet sleep together. On her second visit, that October, we did—going at it for three straight days and nights, dressing only once, very briefly, to go out for a bite at a nearby Thai restaurant. I can almost excuse myself for marrying her that December. The sex was narcotic. I'd flip over onto my back— heart in my throat, my lungs heaving—and realize that half a day had passed. Also, she was a Missouri girl, a comforting detail that probably carried more weight with me than it ought.

When the lovely little wedding was over, along with the truncated but lovely honeymoon on Bald Head Island, off the coast of Wilmington, and when all the rooms had been repainted and the bride installed, it seemed as if bliss had arrived for good. It seemed as if my lonely childhood, battle with alcoholism, the tragic first marriage, and all the rest of my travails were well behind me now. Karma and perseverance had finally paid off.

I'd gotten tenure, and was teaching, writing, getting back to my normal work. My material life was organized for the first (and last) time: towels neatly stacked away, socks matched, hedges cut off at their knees. Sara was an outgoing hit with everyone, was gardening enthusiastically, and had begun working part-time jobs. She was even starting to get along with my dog, a hyper black lab named Elizabeth. And if there was still more lust than love, that was fine for now.

The odd thing is, although my first marriage taught me everything I knew about love, and would seem therefore to have prepared me for my second marriage, in fact it did the opposite. I was far too confident with Sara, partly because I'd built up my confidence sky-high with Jackie.

Everything I wrote, for many years, I wrote for Jackie. I'd stay up all night drafting a poem, and leave a clean copy out on the kitchen table when I turned in at dawn, and it would thrill Jackie to the bone when she read it over her morning coffee. My knowing that a poem I wrote could do that for her kept me going. Not only my poetry, but almost everything else about me—my jokes, my wanderlust, even my crooked and dented nose—delighted Jackie. She fell in love with the idea of the A. A. fellowship (although she wasn't an alcoholic), and enjoyed going to open meetings at my home group in Salt Lake City every week. She found them comforting. And in the last few years, no matter what Jackie and I went through—surgery after surgery, grief and rage and madness with no end in sight—we kept discovering that, together, we were able to face it. Never had I imagined I could matter so much to another human being.

In my first year with Sara, everyone I knew could hardly believe how I'd lucked out, with such a vivacious, multi-talented beauty. I could hardly believe it myself. She seemed equally thrilled and amused with me. But as time went on, it turned out that life with a poet wasn't the passionate, expressive lark she'd expected—she hadn't counted on the hours of quiet I required. Within a year, she'd begun to act resentful. When she attended a large open meeting at my A. A. home group in Wilmington, there was something about the typically riotous and motley crew that she found disturbing; she never went back. She wanted me to get my nose fixed. I finally said, what the hell, I would (but never did). My snoring bothered her, and she often woke me to make me stop.

In this depressing course of events, the bright spot was Sophia's birth and the months that followed, the incredible fact of an inexpressibly perfect blonde baby clinging to my arm like a spider monkey wherever I went. But just after Sophia's first birthday, things began unraveling again.

One night, hoping to make a turnaround, I had a surprise for Sara. I'd written a poem that celebrated our marriage, and it had just been published in an excellent university journal. I presented it to her as we lay side by side in bed. She gave it a glance, shrugged, then lay the magazine down on the bed between us and took up her novel again. I felt half my resolve die in that moment. Later that year, she said she didn't like the way I smelled. I started sleeping on the sofa. One day, I stood at the front door looking out and wondering what had happened.

A
N
E
NDING

[
May
]

1. Tracery

Twenty minutes after taking off from Gatwick, I raise the shade and look out over the branching currents of the North Atlantic Drift, all glittering like silver tracery. Most of us have already adjusted the volume, settled into the movie or sports-page or paperback. Five miles above the Arctic ice, a sense of peace presides. As I peer down through the little window beside me, I begin to make out individual icebergs, schools of far-flung, glinting floes—punctuated by their shadows, thrown onto the mirror-green sea beside them.

The squeal of a young girl behind me makes me smile—thinking of Sophia. My little presents are safely packed, waiting for our reunion. I wonder what I will say to her, I wonder who I am to her. I'm The Green Dragon Club. I'm summers sitting beside the YWCA pool, watching her flip and dolphin-kick. Each time she comes up for air, I'm there.

The flight attendant asks if I'd like a snack.

Who is she? I wonder, smiling out of her cloud. Yes, of course I would.

For another minute now, I imagine that sweet passivity of pool-side / rinkside / music lesson / playground, the state of being a parent. Lying on a lounge near the shallow end of the pool, some novel facedown on my chest, I love to stare for hours at patches of sky through pines. My hearing tuned to distinguish playful cries from pain, from fear—and otherwise adrift.

Up here, I'm holding Gowing's book in my lap—as I have so often over the past year or so. I like to keep it close to me, but frankly I don't often open it anymore. All my earnest reading, the visit with Kees Kaldenbach—all that urgent wandering, intent on figuring out Vermeer's hold on me after the first day in the Rijksmuseum— much of that seems distant and a little amusing to me now. It's like how we respond to the loss of love—with Match.com and counseling and all the rest. The problem is that the object of love isn't really the issue. What's missing is a verb, not a noun. You can look into these faces from three hundred and forty years ago, and feel it.