Maggie Millner - Couplets

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.FOR NICK It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolutions power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. EDNA ST. EDNA ST.

VINCENT MILLAY

I became myself. I became myself. No, I always was myself. Theres no such person as myself. I wouldnt have to turn my eye inward, I thought, if I could train my eye on himthe one I loved. But I was wrong.

My eye loved everything it fell upon. And then one day it fell upon a mirror. And he was nowhere in the mirror. And she was everywhere.

All my life Ive shown up late. But when I do, I compensate for my delayI laugh and preen and carry on as if I had been present all along.

I stayed in utero, for instance, two weeks after I was due, then came out so decisively and fast I couldnt breathe. I spent my first night on earth alone inside a tent flushed full of oxygen, the event from which (my dad believes) have sprung like fires all my weird anxieties. Mostly I cant see myself at all until I sense in someone else a parallel, like how I only realize what I want at the moment I attain it, my mind the final part of me to know. Ive hurt people I love being so late to my desires. Last year, I met someone I thought I couldnt live without, and in the process lost another, without whom I thought Id die. If I had only realizedsooner, etc., etc.

But I handled things ineptly and he left. I didnt die. Instead, I went to therapy and saw the stegosaur uptown, stayed with friends and drank a lot of tea. Even then, riding the bus to visit my new lover, I was breathless always, early almost never.

She found me in the winter at a bar, one of those places in Bed-Stuy not far from Clinton Hilla platonic meeting set up by a friend who worked in media and thought wed get along. I got there first and snatched a booth and started reading Middlemarch, a novel Ive been halfway through for more than half my life.

When she strode through the door, Oh shit, I love that book, Ive read it fifteentimes, she said, and asked my favorite scene. I looked down at page 98, open on the table. Maybe when Lydgatefirst meets Dorothea, and Eliotstalking about how the stealthy convergence of human lots,when analyzed in retrospect,shows a slow preparation of effectsfrom one life on another, I replied. Totally, she said. The conversation turned to poetry, our few mutual friends: ones PhD, ones startup, ones divorce. I was too skittish and caught up in my charade to feel, charging the space between us like a ray, the knowing gaze of Destiny, which Eliot would say stood bysarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Besides, I practically had a husband a man as opposite to her as Casaubon was opposite to Will. On the A train home, I read that paragraph again, then closed the book and marked the chapter, telling myself that Id resume it after.

I thought she thought my life was trivial since she was queer and edited periodicals and I was a poet who had never dated a woman. Every night shed attend some trendy function with people dressed in Eckhaus and Givenchy while I shambled off to walk-in shows at raunchy bars, or raunchier bars that never put on shows. Or anyway, that was my perception. Now I know that hers were mostly networking eventsbook launches and openingstheir settings often even spots where Id have grabbed a drink myself.

Still, when I surveyed the fabric of my life back then, its familiar openwork of sex and teaching, kale and NPR, and the boyfriend at the center I revered but felt I had been failing many years, I dreaded shed dismiss me. (Though when I looked at himand at my friendsI thought, How bad couldmy life really be with people like these in it?Gentle, loyal, practical, considerate) The difference was, I knew my friends, I knew my life, while hers remained a vivid new reality that swirled behind a scintillating door, a world where people wore athleisure haute and seemed to vape incessantly, the sticks lighting up green or white like tiny pagers every time theyd pull. I hated the air that came out of them, the smell like cleaning solvent or an afterthought of fruit, but found them mesmerizing, too. Id zone out and imagine that a tiny person lived inside each cartridge, who would sprint to switch the lightbulb on and fan the fire when she felt a drag. She must get so tired, I would think. This elaborate e-cig reverie was not so different from my theory of her lifewhich, because unknown, was also marvelous and false, complete invention.

It took months to really reach her through the cloud of myth my adoration made. Until I could, I lived in fear shed finally see my fetish and discrepancy, and flee.

The record kept spinning, though it was over. Roselight wafted through the potted fern. What if, you heard yourself saying, I had your permission? Your boyfriend sighed. At your feet, the cat honed his claws against the couch, which doubled as his scratcher.

Space was precious then; you were always having to invent new means to store what little you owned. You liked to think of the smallness of those rooms as a sort of formal constraintand besides, you appreciated how cheap the apartment was, how its windows looked onto a hillside park from the height of which you could watch the evening sun sink exactly into Lady Libertys torch. The place was a smaller version of the apartment you had leased together in California after college, subsisting principally on frozen potstickers and toast. At the time, it hadnt felt like anything was happening at all. But now everything that followed seemed like aftermath. There were the dreams, for example, which had begun after your move back eastdreams so lifelike and profane they felt like pornographic footage from another life.

In one, you were seduced by a throng of elderly women who held you down and licked you all over in a Turkish-style spa. In another, you and a college friend engaged in slow, multiorgasmic tribbing on the floor of her dorm closet, wearing nothing but owl masks. The dreams became a second life, a secret room you visited for part of every day. Your boyfriend pulled the cat into his lap. What do you want to do, he asked, that calls for my permission? You looked past him, out the fogging window.

So I asked to sleep with women. So I asked to sleep with women.

At first, he agreed. If thats what you think you need, he said, I wouldnt want to stop you. But shortly after that he asked me not to. Maybe I was too far gone already floodgates, barn door, whatever. Or maybe the vow I made thenno, I never will again predicted, in a way, its own subversion by establishing a rule that I could break. In middle school, I once got suspended for a hall pass Id stolen and then forged, after skipping class to make out with a boy Id barely met who groped my still-imaginary breasts beneath my shirt.

Afterward, I remember most of all my parents shame, their somber faces, which erased the aphrodisiac of misbehavior. Looking back, sometimes I suspect that the appeal was in the rule-breaking (e.g., to steal, to cut the class, to lie)which was, itself, the sex. That lust to me was wanting to transgress beside another. To be so totally compelled. To share a truth you have to lie to tell.

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