Wild

“You should go without me,” I said to Paul as he held the letter. And I said it again and again as we talked throughout the next weeks, my conviction growing by the day. Part of me was terrified by the idea of him leaving me; another part of me desperately hoped he would. If he left, the door of our marriage would swing shut without my having to kick it. I would be free and nothing would be my fault. I loved him, but I’d been impetuous and nineteen when we’d wed; not remotely ready to commit myself to another person, no matter how dear he was. Though I’d had attractions to other men since shortly after we married, I’d kept them in check. But I couldn’t do that anymore. My grief obliterated my ability to hold back. So much had been denied me, I reasoned. Why should I deny myself?

My mom had been dead a week when I kissed another man. And another a week after that. I only made out with them and the others that followed—vowing not to cross a sexual line that held some meaning to me—but still I knew I was wrong to cheat and lie. I felt trapped by my own inability to either leave Paul or stay true, so I waited for him to leave me, to go off to graduate school alone, though of course he refused.

He deferred his admission for a year and we stayed in Minnesota so I could be near my family, though my nearness in the year that followed my mother’s death accomplished little. It turned out I wasn’t able to keep my family together. I wasn’t my mom. It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her. Without her, Eddie slowly became a stranger. Leif and Karen and I drifted into our own lives. Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren’t what we’d been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope. I never did make that Thanksgiving dinner. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around eight months after my mom died, my family was something I spoke of in the past tense.

So when Paul and I finally moved to New York City a year after we had originally intended to, I was happy to go. There, I could have a fresh start. I would stop messing around with men. I would stop grieving so fiercely. I would stop raging over the family I used to have. I would be a writer who lived in New York City. I would walk around wearing cool boots and an adorable knitted hat.

It didn’t go that way. I was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.

During the day I wrote stories; at night I waited tables and made out with one of the two men I was simultaneously not crossing the line with. We’d lived in New York only a month when Paul dropped out of graduate school, deciding he wanted to play guitar instead. Six months later, we left altogether, returning briefly to Minnesota before departing on a months-long working road trip all across the West, making a wide circle that included the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, Big Sur and San Francisco. At trip’s end in late spring, we landed in Portland and found restaurant jobs, staying first with my friend Lisa in her tiny apartment and then on a farm ten miles outside the city, where—in exchange for looking after a goat and a cat and a covey of exotic game hens—we got to live rent-free for the summer. We pulled the futon from our truck and slept on it in the living room under a big wide window that looked out over a filbert orchard. We took long walks and picked berries and made love. I can do this, I thought. I can be Paul’s wife.

But again I was wrong. I could only be who it seemed I had to be. Only now more so. I didn’t even remember the woman I was before my life had split in two. Living in that little farmhouse on the edge of Portland, a few months past the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I wasn’t worried about crossing the line anymore. When Paul accepted a job offer in Minneapolis that required him to return to Minnesota midway through our exotic hen-sitting gig, I stayed behind in Oregon and fucked the ex-boyfriend of the woman who owned the exotic hens. I fucked a cook at the restaurant where I’d picked up a job waiting tables. I fucked a massage therapist who gave me a piece of banana cream pie and a free massage. All three of them over the span of five days.