Part 12 (2/2)
In the Company of Men THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father My father fractured the hearts of all the woh and think about the ht I loved, it is with a split apart heart If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry
Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don't I was born the year Kennedy was shot So I can't re about it But I remember Michael In every part ofnext to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech It was late at night I walked up to the floor to ceiling s and looked in at theon canvas I heldhappened inMy eyes stung andof vodka frolassand lifted lass and knocked Phillip turned and laughed, pointed Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked
Michael My father's naht, as a man in his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands ainst canvas?
I didn't learn to loveMichael
There is so hter in a family full of women
I didn't learn to love holidays fro Mike and Dean's house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you iine fantasy worlds as a child - warhts and ribbons and the ss and spice - with no father to smash it apart
I didn't learn how to cook fro Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting so into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew
I didn't learn how to be feminine from any women I learned to take offat pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone likeon the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand Michael and Dean ithwith Devin on the top of Harvey's Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record albuamble Michael was not with me when I o, butof him, too
Once Michael caene After the baby died Philip and I were nothing about each other I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town Philip worked at Sht he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me But on the second day Michael showed up onI opened the door He looked like ass He had his suitcase with hi efficiency It reeks There's cat piss and shi+t and oil paint everywhere The guy doesn't live like a human” And I let him in
It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip Together Deeply And that both of us left Phillip Divorced him Forever Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands It was a sacred truth between us
After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends I hated knowing he was there My Michael and Dean Goddamn you, Devin But then Mike called and told me, ”All he wants to talk about is how ive a shi+t how many times he screws the infant GAWD It's so juvenile” The next day he called again and said, ”Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while ere at work I think he stole one of our pans And soain”
I know it's petty Idiotic But I loved hi ether, it was hard Andy was still o One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died They moved there for work, I'raphic designers But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me I mean I wished it was true I wished the ether,” the afternoon ned 12 beers in a row in ene, was somehohy he was near It's the wish of a child
I called Mike in Seattle froo to tell him about my man situation I didn't call my mother, or my sister, or my father, or any woman friend I called Michael I called to tell hiht I had fallen in love with a one bad That theand beautiful and played the cello and could beat the crap out of prettyThat the man had lived in Spain and witnessed some ETA stuff and that the man had interviewed people from Earth Liberation Front and that the ht I'd sed ht to havea mess But you knohat Mike said? He said, ”Jesus Thank God you finally got with someone whose story can keep up with yours!” Then he said, ”We're going out of town for a week You should couy up”
I did
Our son Miles, my beautiful alive boy, was conceived in Michael's house In Mike and Dean's bed On the 600 count twill sheets With Jake the dog loyally guarding our love In his house, the only house I ever felt the word ”home” in my heart, a boy was born
In es of Mike and Dean Me and Mike on the floor of a Baptist church at an Me and Mike and Dean stripped to our underwear, running into the ocean on the Oregon coast In Dece a Christmas rabbit with olives and capers that Andy and Mike cooked - snuggled up in Italy -ourthe door when I sent my sister to them - my sister whose lost tenure had manifested as a nervous breakdown - how they said, ”You can come in” How they let her live with them until her self returned Miles and Mike and Dean and Andy on top of the space Needle My God How h to break a heart open
The ies in my head and heart I knohat they are I do They are a family album It is possible to make fae There are thousands of ways to love men
A Sanctuary THERE'S SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE o to a place near Portland, Oregon I'd been fired in San Diego and on - back tohat I knew, and what Andy knew, the Northwest Andy drove a U-Haul, and urgling and pooing his pants in the back like a little road warrior
Virginia Everything that rew in my life, a beautiful wetted stone turned over years First she wasI'd ever inia became a friend who stayed near She showed me intimacy is a word untethered from sexuality Unconditionally, I drank
The Saab broke down in Weed - yes, Weed, and Virginia and I sort of paced on the side of the road thinking, will he look in the rearview and notice we're gone? Will this on? No bars on the little cell of a bitch We weren't scared, women like the two of us? That would not scare us We'd have been excellent pioneers Like Becky Boone
But he did notice, because he's that kind of guy, and within 20our direction Then we all had to cram in the weird front space of the U-Haul and pretend we didn't have an infant stashed between the seats by the gearshi+ft and cigarettes Virginia and I sharing the passenger seat, our butts e Burbury We abandoned the Saab on the side of the road Marking our exit like a scar
When we got to Oregon Miles and I took a bath at a Holiday Inn He lay against ainstin between spit bubbles, and his ar easily I have a picture of us like that My tits are as big as a human head, so it looks a little like a threeheaded creature for a second, until you see his facial features Then I picked his little bucket of baby weight up and turned hiood one, and shed ainst my heart I suddenly felt his lifeforce - not the lifeforce of babies-a lifeforce bigger than a night sky It was alht I went into labor during a thunder storm It was the exact opposite of the heart ihter was born and died The two of us in the water, thunderhearted
At soht I walked out onto our little Holiday Inn balcony and Virginia was sarette on hers I looked over at her My God This person I had watched go fro woman to warrior beauty It took htdaughter I almost couldn't breathe with the wonder
”Those are death sticks, you know,” I said
”Yeah,” she said
”I love you, you know”
”Yeah I do Me too” Her eyes filling with tears across the distance
We were driving to a house Andy had found and rented on the internet Such a riskythe next chapter of your life in cyberspace But so gloriously risky Because this was a hacker A guy who had cybersquatted Bill Gates When he was at the coht of
The house looked filled with light and space when I looked at the internet photos I knew the value of light and space And there were trees in the photos Everywhere The house was inside soon When I asked Andy ”Why this house? Is it near my job?”
He said, ”No, it's not near your job But it is sanctuary” At the ti in my skin trusted him
The road to the house off of I-84 wound around forests and snuck alongside the Sandy River I saw a few people riding the river on inner tubes I saw fly fishermen Kayakers I saw the land rise and fall like it does in Oregon wilderness Alders Oaks Maples Douglas Firs Everything it seeht briefly of ht how ood between us Then the word father left altogether, since it was nothing about an crying Gut wrenching crying A crying that must have taken years, pulled up froonals The first octagonal had theup to a sleeping loft The sleeping loft had 360 degree s so that if you were, say, in bed, all you saas trees The second octagonal had a kitchen with cabinets you'd pay a fortune for in the city - the deep cherry and blond wood like inside trees
Outside the house there was nothing but forest The Bull Run Wilderness hid elk and deer and bobcat Wild pheasants and coyote and eagles and great blue herons A freshwater creek trickled at the base of our property - water that ran for iant warehouse loo studio The owner made wooden marimbas as beautiful as music sounds He showed them to us They smelled like life The owner had built the house Crafted the ith the passion of an artist Inside the warehouse was an enor inabout the freedo felt older than me Inside the house, I felt safety All those trees protecting us A river curling around us So up until that point in inia and Miles sat down in front of the house, butterflies and dragonflies and a hubird accompanied our distance As if to say, you are home
We were 25 minutes from the city I would work in From people We were 45 inia walked off a ways to have a cigarette Then it was just me, Andy, and Miles I said, ”Andy, I can't believe how beautiful it is here It takes my breath away” I turned away from him I felt small Maybe like a kid ”I don't kno to thank you”
”You don't have to thankup behind me with Miles on his shoulder like a little secondthe impossible sound ordinary
Our first days that ran into nights than ran back into days in that house in the forest were like what I understand Shakespeare to reen world Seriously You knohere the action of a play starts out in norical ht's Drea or run around naked in the woods Actually, Northrup Frye came up with the phrase Sorry It's the Goddamn acadereen world really didfor e up any Godforsaken et a Goddamn tree No one yelled their head off No one cried their eyes out We si Christmas tree they had, like a 12-footer, strapped it to the car, drove it to our sanctuary, and peed our pants with joy - the open space of the octagons filling with the slee
And there was no architect's office with sht while children hid in their bedrooms scared to sleep or drea desks Andy and I pushed together So while the parents riting, the child was sleeping, and art kept us well and space kept us well and trees watched over us so dreaet born
There was no mother you couldn't find in the house because she was out selling real estate, or locked in the bathroom with a bottle
I used to watch Miles fall asleep fro allof Shakespearean sentence structures when they watched their babies drunkenly drift into sleep I knoatching your boy suck tit doesn't seem very Shakespearian on the face of it But when I watched Miles go from mother's milk to burp to deep and frothy drea on us, I thought of Shakespearean chiase is a crisscross structure A doubling back sentence A doubling ofMy favorite is ”love's fire heats water, water cools not love”
As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transforreen world events and actions lose their origins Like in dreams Time loses itself The is are undone and res