Brigid could see the stoop of her former writing professor’s shoulders—she’d once remarked to her husband that his posture was like a heavy coat on a wire hanger, he looked so dragged down. Her novel was in his hands. He was fifth in line at her book signing and now she couldn’t focus on what the woman in the red coat was saying. She narrowed in on the woman’s equally red lips—“I really hated your book at first”—but her former writing professor’s stare was as concentrated as a lover’s. He was old when he had been her professor and he was older now, his skin as grey, lined, and tough looking as elephant hide. The elephant man, she thought, even though he was still handsome, a certain sophisticated elegance, an old-fashioned movie-star quality, Sean Connery-like. He even had the soft, marbled voice of a Scotsman.
“Could you also,” the woman in red said, leaning in so that her perfume wafted like a gust of wind, “write the first line of the book, too?”
Why? That would take forever. She thought of how her former professor’s aching hips must feel on this snowy night in Manhattan, his knees; how awful it must be to wait in line to speak to her, his former student. All this hoopla about her debut novel, all this bubbling about. The introduction that had made her sound as if she’d conquered the world. Her former professor had written six books. They had done moderately well. A writer’s writer is what a person would call him. What was she? A woman’s writer. Someone scheduled to appear on morning television.
God, shut up, she wanted to say to the woman in red. You’re turning this into a spectacle. Stop laughing! Stop looking so fucking unhinged!
She did as she was told: she signed the book, then wrote the book’s first line: All the women of Barra are dead in their beds.
* * *
“Brigid. Hi.” Her former writing professor held out her novel, and she took it. She knew whatever she wrote needed to be full of gratitude: it was what the moment called for. Was she grateful? What had he done for her? Given her an A. Pointed out her country way of speaking—youse guys—but in a sweet, flirtatious way, so it hadn’t stung. She liked this man. She liked him enough. With love and indebtedness, she wrote, then drew an absurdly large B, which managed to look lewd, like a teenage boy’s rendition of giant breasts, or, worse, a ball sack.
* * *
When she returned from the reading, her husband, Jack, was outstretched on the hotel bed, his legs crossed at the ankles. Even in this New York hotel room, he looked like the Oregon poet that he was—dirty-blond hair falling into his face, wire-rimmed circular glasses, a navy-blue sweater with a hole in the elbow over a white button-down shirt, the collar askew. Like Kurt Cobain, she thought, if he hadn’t shot himself in the face. Her husband had removed his pants, and the hair on his legs stood at attention. He had on his elf boxers, a gag Christmas gift from her. Christmas had been three months ago.
“Jack?” she said. Her husband had his faraway look, his face angled downward, his eyes elsewhere, not seeing the white duvet cover but something else, either from his past or in his future.
She sat on the bed and twisted his leg hair. She could make it stand up in coils.
“Ouch,” he said and moved away. “So, did he show up?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
She brought her knees to her chest. Jack was suspicious of all men but especially her former writing professor. “Yes,” she said.
“And why would he do that?” he asked.
She was suddenly exhausted. “Because he was my professor.”
“He lives in Ithaca.”
She wormed out of her clothing and burrowed under the white duvet, wishing it were a porthole to another world. She waited for Jack to interrogate her further but instead his hand found hers.
“Listen,” he said. “I got a phone call while you were out.”
Out. At the book signing. Not just at a coffee shop or buying pantyhose.
“And?” It came out a little shrill.
“I got the fellowship,” he said.
The fellowship. A year in Glasgow to research his third book of poems. Her book had taken place in Scotland, too, but she hadn’t gone, had only done a significant number of Google searches. The faraway look—she recognized it now—was about whether he wanted her to go with him.
* * *
In August, they arrived. From the airplane, Scotland looked like the Grand Canyon, only smaller and covered in grass. Little white things, which looked like lint, littered the hills. She squinted—sheep.
All the razzle-dazzle about her book was over. It had sold two thousand copies—a failure, although no one would tell her that until she tried to sell the next one. The publisher wanted to change the jacket art for the paperback. “To appeal to the book club crowd.” Who were they? They were somewhere in the wilds of America, dipping their hands into bags of potato chips. She and Jack were above it all, their plane about to touch down.
“It’s Glas-go,” Jack said. The wheels hit the pavement, and the engine roared.
“What’s that?” she said.
“You keep saying Glas-gow.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”
They rented a flat beside a church with the skinniest spire in Europe. To turn on the hot water, she had to push a button that looked like it would set off an explosion in a distant land. No air conditioning. A fridge the size of a hotel-room minibar. No freezer. Their neighbor, Alastair McCullough, told them people bought things fresh. When she asked, “what about ice cream?” he said people went out to eat it.
All details that should have been in her debut novel. It hadn’t come out in the UK. To her knowledge, no Scotsperson had read it or would read it. Jack’s first book had chronicled the death of his infant son—an event that had broken up his first marriage but also skyrocketed his career. The world was discovering that men could have a tender side, and Jack’s book was part of that discovery. His second book had sold well (for poetry), earning him a modest advance and this fellowship for what he was doing now: mining the Kelvin River, which was full of garbage. What he found in the river would be the subject of the poems. Every morning, he put on waders, tied his hair into a topknot and walked the length of the river in the August heat, trawling for trash. It was supposed to be a portrait of Glasgow, as told from the river’s garbage. But also a meditation on humanity. And also something else. She wasn’t trying to be glib when describing it to Alastair. She believed in Jack’s work, particularly his first two books, which were stunning. Still, she and Alastair were eying each other, lips quivering, on the verge of something—possibly dangerous, explosive laughter.
* * *
The first week behind them, she and Jack sat in the kitchen in their underwear, the bay window open, hoping for a breeze. She could hear Alastair’s voice through the thin walls. An argument. A lot of stomping. Then silence.
“They’re fighting,” she said.
“Who?”
“Alastair,” she said, “and Ezra.”
“Who?” He was utterly uninterested in their neighbors.
She, however, couldn’t get enough of them. Well, of Alastair. Alastair’s boyfriend, Ezra, was an artist. He made sculptures that resembled large pieces of beef jerky in a studio around the corner, and Alastair worked twelve-hour shifts at Scottish Meats. Each must take some inspiration from the other, Brigid said to Jack, then waited for laughter, but he was busy cataloging what he’d found in the Kelvin that day: a toothbrush; a pacifier; a retainer.
“Mouth things,” she said.
“Hm?” said Jack, holding the pacifier, not looking up.
“You know, he used to be a model,” she said, thinking of Alastair’s chiseled jaw, his eyes as blue as a Siberian husky’s, salt-and-pepper hair with an undercut so she could see the dark mole behind his left ear.
“Huh?”
“Alastair. He still does it sometimes. Modeling.”
“Oh.”
“He’s not just a meat guy.”
* * *
A double date. First to the “chippy,” then to a movie. They walked down Great Western Road, Alastair holding Ezra’s hand and Jack holding hers. The evening was cool. Two childless couples in their late thirties out on the town, Brigid thought. She was a veteran of two miscarriages. She had earned the right not to have a child. She was even wearing lipstick. It didn’t matter, though: Alastair eclipsed them all in skinny jeans, a tuxedo shirt, jean jacket, and cowboy boots. She thought he’d been joking when he told her Glasgow had a thriving cowboy scene, but indeed it did, and Alastair and Ezra were a big part of it. On Saturday nights they went to a club called the Grande Ole Opry. She and Jack had yet to join them. You had to be in the right mood to play cowboy, and that mood never seemed to strike.
“This one,” said Ezra, pointing to a bleak-looking takeaway joint. “They have the best cheese.” He was shorter than Alastair, with a round, milky face and dark curly hair. He was a research fellow at the Glasgow School of Art, an exhibition in the Scottish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale already under his belt. But Alastair was the masterpiece, Brigid thought. She looked at Jack, waiting to feel an ignition of the heart. His hair had grown shaggy and he’d slicked it back with water. Fresh from mining the Kelvin River, he wore cargo shorts and a t-shirt, New Balance running shoes. Stripped from the pretence of his “rising star of Portland poetry” clothes, he looked like a guy who was exactly where he was from: the wilds of Eastern Oregon.
They walked inside the takeaway shop and ordered two “chips ‘n cheese” to share. A drunk man in the back was eating deep-fried pizza. They sat at a grubby table, her facing Alastair, Jack facing Ezra.
She felt Alastair’s eyes on her. She was wearing a black-and-white striped blouse, black mini skirt, and black pointed flats. “You look like a French porn star,” Jack had said before they left the flat. “And you look like,” she replied, “an American.”
“You should see more of Scotland,” said Alastair, his Glaswegian accent repressed by a decade of modeling in London. “Edinburgh. Skye.”
“Skye,” said Brigid. “The Isle of Skye?”
“That’s the one,” he said.
The drunk man rose to his feet, abandoning his pizza. He walked to the counter and leaned against it. “Deep-froyed dog fer takeaway,” he said.
“Oh jeez,” Brigid whispered to Alastair.
“Oh jeez what?” he whispered back.
“I thought he was ordering a deep-fried dog!”
“He did.”
“No, a dog dog. Dog dog. Dog dog.”
It was happening again. She felt something like carbonation rising inside her. Alastair’s eyes locked with hers. They laughed soundlessly, secretly. She glanced at Jack, who was peeling the cheese off his chips.
“Should have gotten the pizza,” he said.
If given the gift of time travel, she thought, her husband would use it only to order different things from restaurants. She imagined herself stopping some awful Amtrak accident—Don’t get on the train!—while Jack wandered back into the chippy, saying, "the chips have too much cheese."
“Get the pizza next time,” she said, trying to recover.
The drunk man pivoted on one foot, barely able to stand.
* * *
And then to the movie theater. They sat in the lobby and each drank a beer. The only thing to eat was something resembling sponge cake, so Brigid bought one.
Jack was in the bathroom; Ezra buying the tickets.
“What is it,” Alastair said, putting his hand over hers, “that you write about?”
“Men,” she said. “Men who kill women.”
“Right, then,” he said.
She launched into her spiel about The Women of Barra. A virus kills every woman in Barra. Six hundred women. “The book tells the story of who invented the virus,” she said, “and how the island copes afterwards.”
“A man did it, yeah?” Alastair said.
She moved her hair from one shoulder to the other. “You’ll have to read it if you want to know more.” Too bleak, a reviewer had said. She had no new ideas. Her brain was a hollow vessel where nothing grew.
“I will.”
Ezra returned with the tickets, and Jack emerged from the bathroom. He’d lost sight of where they were sitting, and Brigid watched him scan the lobby—hands on hips, looking miserable—before he spotted her.
They were here to see The Saddest Music in the World with Isabella Rossellini, then Guy Maddin was giving a talk. Alastair and Ezra were big Guy Maddin fans. Neither Jack nor Brigid had heard of him.
“Can’t take that in with you,” Alastair said, gesturing at Brigid’s sponge cake, and then he and Ezra were hurrying into the theater, Alastair’s hand firmly on Ezra’s butt cheek.
She offered the sponge cake to Jack, but he was glaring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Tell me what man drives four hours—when it’s fucking snowing—to see his former student read.”
“Please don’t start this right now,” she said. It was the beer. It made Jack paranoid.
“Brigid,” he said. “Tell me what man would drive all that way if there wasn’t something waiting.”
Something waiting. She shook her head. No. Not this. She could feel Jack’s jealously like a fog, wrapping around her neck, around her wrists and ankles.
“Why are you penalizing me for something he did? I didn’t ask him to come.”
He paused to work the sponge cake out of his teeth. “You’ve done nothing but humiliate me tonight,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re practically humping Alastair’s leg.”
“Jesus, Jack.” Her cheeks flushed. “He’s gay.”
“What difference,” said Jack, walking into the dark of the theater, “does that make?”
* * *
She woke to a horrible sound, like a bomb. She rushed to the kitchen’s bay window and scanned the Kelvin River, Jack somewhere within, trawling for inspiration, then over the bridge and past the subway station. The buildings were dirty and soot-encrusted, Dickensian. The bombing sound had stopped. All she could hear was the distant whine of bagpipes. “The sound of Scotland,” Jack had said when they first arrived. More like the sound of a thousand mosquitoes, she thought now.
She looked the other way, over to the Mackintosh cathedral and the other flats that looked just like the one she was standing in. No bomb. Her hands were shaking. The sound had been so loud.
The smell of meat. She could smell it under the door. Alastair usually didn’t get home until midnight—a day off? She checked her reflection in the mirror, shook out her hair with her hands.
He answered the door in a bathrobe and white cowboy boots with spurs.
“Hold on,” he said and disappeared. She heard the click of the stove being turned off. Loretta Lynn was playing in the background. The meat sizzled and popped. Her mouth watered. Her nipples grew against the fabric of her shirt.
“You didn’t hear it?” she said when he reappeared.
“Hear what?”
“The big boom.”
He went to the window, and she followed him. “I don’t see anything,” he said. He opened the window and leaned out. She could hear sirens now. “Oh,” he said. “Oh no.”
He left her in the hall and returned fully dressed, his face red with either anger or shame. “I have to go.”
“Go?” she said, but he was already headed down the red-carpeted stairs, then opening the huge front door. The bright light of day shot into the foyer, and then he was running down the street and around the corner, toward, what she could see now, was a scene of absolute chaos: ambulances, fire trucks, police cars—all surrounding a building, much like the one her flat was in.
“Wait,” she called, but she found herself in a swarm of people, soot on their faces, fire fighters snaking white hoses through the crowd. She looked up and saw helicopters hovering like bees. The heat was unbearable, and she brought her hands to her face, as if to save the skin from peeling off. Above her, smoke poured into the sky.
It wasn’t like in the movies—no one had blocked off the scene with yellow tape. No one seemed to be in charge. In front of her was a mountain of burnt rubble. No one stopped Alastair from climbing over it.
“Alastair,” she cried. “What are you doing?”
He disappeared into the darkness.
In an instant she knew she was standing in front of the building where Ezra’s studio was. She remembered now—Ezra had been rambling about his latest art project after the Guy Maddin movie. Something about making a cube out of durable material, with a hole where Ezra would pipe gas into, then another tiny hole, big enough for a match head. It was supposed to make a big boom but then fizzle out. She couldn’t remember what it was supposed to symbolize or how it was related to the beef jerky.
People hurried by, wearing masks, headlamps, carrying big red medical bags. She thought she heard someone yell at her to move, but the accent was still difficult for her, like everyone’s mouths were full of rocks.
She turned to a woman who was leaning against an ambulance. She felt as if she didn’t speak to someone she would start weeping. And it would never stop.
“My friends,” Brigid said, “they’re in there.”
The woman shook her head and pointed to her ears. She was deaf from the blast.
* * *
She stood in the hallway with Alastair, listening to him tell her about Ezra with a raspy voice. Jack was in the shower, washing off the muck of the Kelvin. It was almost midnight.
Ezra was alive. In hospital, as Alastair put it, on a respirator. His lungs full of soot and blood. He told the doctors he thought he was dead until Alastair touched his hand.
“He fell,” Alastair said, gesturing upward. “He fell three stories.”
She looked up. She imagined a ragged hole in the ceiling, revealing the smoke-filled sky. The floor disappearing underneath her feet. Falling. Her hair streaming out above her.
A gas leak. It would have happened eventually. Ezra’s art hadn’t caused the explosion—he was just the first to light a match.
In a gesture so bold she gasped, Alastair took her hands. He brought her so close their noses were touching. His whole body was shaking.
“Alastair,” she said.
She let his body rest against hers. Through the flat’s thin walls, she heard Jack turn off the water, then the slosh of his wet footsteps approaching.
“He’s going to be okay,” she said and placed her hand on Alastair’s heart.
* * *
That night, Brigid lay in bed with Jack, the moon illuminating the room. White fitted sheet, white comforter. No one used top sheets here. Or dryers. She’d hung the fitted sheet out the window to dry, and it smelled of beer and vomit, of Alastair’s sizzling steaks.
She turned to Jack. Her attraction to Alastair had reduced her self esteem to that of a crushed soda can. She kissed Jack’s lips, hoping to reanimate herself. They had fallen in love during their MFA. Back then Jack was a handsome, slightly broken-seeming guy from Oregon, his debut book of poems “making waves,” it being about the death of an infant, but from the perspective of a man. The father. It was hard not to fall under his aloof, west-coast spell.
The life they would create together, the baby they would raise—here, in this Glaswegian flat, she replayed what he’d said the night he proposed. How lucky she’d felt. Now what she felt was nervousness.
She took a lock of Jack’s hair between her fingers. “Time for a cut?” she said.
He turned away.
“Did you sleep with him?” Jack asked.
“What? No.” She sat up and gathered her hair in her hands. Just as she had pulled away from Alastair, Jack had come into the hallway, a towel around his waist. “He’s a meat guy.”
“I don’t mean Alastair,” he said. “I mean him.”
“No,” she said. “Goddamn you, no.”
“I’m allowed to like people,” she said to her husband. “And they’re allowed to like me. I’m allowed to like people—even as much as I like you.”
He turned to her. “But not more than me.”
“If that’s the rule,” she said, pausing to breathe in the beery sheets, “I haven’t broken it.”
“Haven’t you, though?”
“It’s our anniversary,” she said, lying down again. “This weekend.”
“I know,” he said.
He took off his glasses and moved toward her. Without his glasses, his eyes were darker, bigger, like someone else’s eyes. They had been married for five years and she still felt uncomfortable when he took off his glasses.
“You hate me,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“You hate all men.”
“That doesn’t include you.”
“So many footnotes,” he said.
“What?”
“Everything with you has a footnote. You hate men. But, footnote, not me.”
Two miscarriages, she wanted to say. I’ve had two miscarriages because of you.
“Please don’t do that thing,” she said instead, “where you confuse what I’ve written with who I am.”
“As if you don’t go looking for yourself in my poems.”
“There’s nothing to look for,” she said. “You don’t write about me.”
An old argument. Nothing more to say. He rolled onto his back and she put her head on his shoulder. She felt his muscles relax, the familiar letting-go as he started to fall asleep.
“Let’s go to Skye,” she whispered.
“What’s there?” he whispered back. His fingers came alive on her skin. He lifted her leg over his.
* * *
To her left lay a barren and craggy landscape, flat. Behind her and to the right sprawled a field overgrown with bluebells. In front of her: the Atlantic and the islands Rum, Muck, and Eigg, or the Hebrides—where Barra was—or Canna, she didn’t know, one of them anyway. The sky was perfect, big white clouds above their heads. She took a picture.
All the houses on Skye were white. They walked with their heads down to avoid sunstroke. After two hours, they were nowhere near anyone or anything. Defeated and thirsty, they ended up in a little cove. White sand, turquoise water—as though they were in the Caribbean. She was sunburnt. Jack took off his shirt and tied it around his head. She’d slipped an hour ago and her jeans were ripped at the knee.
Her former writing professor had told her that if she attended a few private tutorials with him, her writing—particularly on the sentence level—would improve vastly. He had an apartment that was as shabby as she’d imagined: teetering bookshelves, a faded Persian rug, an ancient gas stove. He offered her a cigarette, lighting it with the blue flame of the stove, and she took it, not knowing yet that she was pregnant for the first time. Now, he said, gesturing to the kitchen table, where an early, terrible draft of her novel sat. Let’s attend to these adverbs.
She got an agent after he’d heavily edited her manuscript, then a book contract. Nothing. Not a kiss between them. Not a hand placed on a leg.
Still, the night of her reading in Manhattan, after she’d given him back the signed copy of her book, the B of her name made lascivious by her own hand, he had lingered a moment. Then he passed her what at first looked like a credit card but was, upon closer examination, the key to a hotel room.
“Hope to see you,” he said in his gentle voice. He gestured to the next woman in line. “She’s all yours.”
How she wanted to tell Jack about what her former writing professor had done. How she wanted to share with him how swiftly it had ruined everything—her book, her writing, her sense of agency in the world.
Instead she’d thrown the room key in a trashcan. She hadn’t told Jack a thing. He’d have lorded it over her. Told her he’d been right about the guy all along. Tell me what man drives four hours . . .
Perhaps the marriage had ended for her that night in New York City. The moment she realized she would have to keep secrets. Secrets worse than infidelity. Secrets about pain.
There was litter on the beach. Anchors, chains, that sort of thing.
She picked up a chunk of green sea glass and handed it to Jack. “For your book?” she said.
“I’m only interested in the Kelvin,” he said.
A different sort of man would leave her. Would have left her a long time ago. She hadn’t provided what had been expected. Her belly, as flat as the day she met him. And she had desires. Desires that spanned beyond him. Miles to go before I sleep, she said in her head. And many more men to sleep with.
A different man would beat her with the sea glass, until it was embedded into her brain. A different man would throw her into the sea, hands bound behind her back.
“Should we keep going?” he said. He took a swig of water and passed her the canteen.
To the lighthouse or in general? She couldn’t bear to ask.
Her phone buzzed.
“He’s okay,” she said to Jack, waving the phone at him. “Ezra’s out of surgery and he’s okay.”
“Sure,” said Jack.
“You’re not happy?”
“It’s not that,” he said. He put the sea glass in his pocket.
“It’s just a crush,” she said.
“It’s not the thing with Alastair that bothers me,” he said. He looked at his feet, kicked some pebbles around with his shoe. “I understand crushes. I get them, too, Brigid.”
She scanned her mind for all the people he could have crushes on. His agent, yes. His editor. His publicist. All the women of publishing.
“What is it, then?” she asked. But he was walking toward the ocean, his cargo shorts billowing in the wind.
“What is it, then, that bothers you?” she called out. “Tell me, please.”
“I have given myself over to you,” he said, turning to her. He folded his arms. “But you. You have always kept a part of yourself separate.”
But that’s right, she thought. You can’t have all of me. You don’t get to have all of me.
Before she and Jack had left for Skye, Alastair told them that if they looked across to Mallaig, they would see a shaft of light at the entrance of Loch Nevis. The light was nearly always there. Nevis in Gaelic meant “heaven.” She walked to where her husband was standing, and she took his hand, and together they squinted for a long time.
* * *
When they returned to their little flat, Jack fell asleep, exhausted by the journey. She lay on her back and thought of when they’d visited the Necropolis by Glasgow Cathedral. A boys’ choir had been there, singing among the tombstones. One tombstone was so big she’d thought it was a smokestack.
Jack talked about him sometimes—the baby. His baby. Until she’d met Jack, she thought that men didn’t care very much about babies, or children in general.
The baby’s name had been Mercury. Jack had come up with it. The perfect, celestial name for a poet’s son who hadn’t lived even one day.
It surprised her—the way, every now and then, Jack wept. That was another thing she didn’t think men did. She thought crying was to women what masturbation was to men. Every day, each bent to their respective tasks.
She looked at her sleeping husband. His eyelids were twitching. She felt his familiar warmth beside her.
Something happened, Jack, and it undid me.
Something happened, Jack, and I feel like I can’t tell you. But let me tell you anyway.
Her first miscarriage was nothing more than a giant period. Nothing gory. No embryo held in the hand. And hardly pregnant at all—she’d even gotten out a magnifying glass to see the faint, second pink line. Maybe that one didn’t count.
The second happened a few weeks before Christmas. The day she’d bought Jack the elf boxers—not just elf boxers. She’d also gotten him a five-hundred-dollar Movado watch, taken out of her advance from The Women of Barra. She bought the gifts, then decided to walk home instead of taking a cab—she felt good. She felt alive with life. A little bean within her, nine weeks along. It was a two-mile walk, no hills or rocky terrain, just straightforward Portland sidewalks. Overcast and in the 40s—an unremarkable day. In her head, she went over what she would write in Jack’s Christmas card. She didn’t want him to make fun of her. He was against sentimentality of any kind, in life and in art.
When she opened the door to their apartment, Jack’s cheeks were rosy from wine, and the smell of rosemary and tomato sauce was in the air. Some other poets were over, and he said he hoped she didn’t mind. She did and didn’t. She hid the gifts in her dresser, then walked into the kitchen. She told everyone she was pregnant. They cheered and clinked glasses. She held her belly even though there was nothing to hold.
In the morning they had breakfast, and Jack hurried off to teach his last class of the semester. She worked on a story, then a Q&A for a magazine to help promote The Women of Barra. When she saw blood on the toilet paper, she texted Jack. Are you sure? he texted back, which seemed ridiculous, then and now. I’m sure.
I have office hours, he texted next.
When she thinks of it now, the memory slides in and out of focus. The feeling of something tearing, something moving in her that wasn’t supposed to be moved. The sense she didn’t have anymore—the sense of feeling alive with life.
That’s the part she wished she could tell Jack. She wanted to tell him how strongly she’d felt the little bean’s spirit inside of her. But he would laugh it off. Accuse her of magical thinking. He might even invoke Mercury—how he had been the one to know a child’s spirit, if there was such a thing. But, no, Jack. She had felt him. She had felt him as strongly as if she’d once known him—like someone you remember, from a lifetime ago, suddenly and without warning, brought to you by a scent, someone’s perfume maybe, or the taste of something sweet in your mouth.
* * *
u up?
It was Alastair. She looked at Jack, snoring beside her.
Yeah. Why? She texted back.
the moon, he wrote. She looked out the window. The moon was twice its usual size and blood red.
lunar eclipse, he texted.
She thought about waking Jack. He would like to see this big red moon. Instead, she found herself knocking softly on Alastair’s door. Alastair and Ezra’s flat had a little balcony. She wanted to watch the eclipse outside, in the cool night air.
“Hi,” Alastair said, and stepped back to make room for her.
He led her through his apartment, then onto the balcony. They stood together, eyeing the moon. She’d read somewhere that a blood moon was supposed to signify the end of the world.
“Did you see it?” he asked her. “The light. The light at Loch Nevis.”
“No,” she said. “We didn’t see heaven this time.”
“Ah well,” he said. He sat on a folding chair and stretched out his legs. He was taller than Jack, model tall.
“Jack’s been to Greece several times,” she said. “He said the light there is better.”
“Oh,” said Alastair, laughing. “Sorry to disappoint him.”
Across the street, a drunk couple stumbled by, arm in arm, oblivious to the moon.
“I missed you,” said Alastair, his voice soft. “Did you miss me?”
* * *
Once the fellowship was over, they returned to Oregon. Jack finished his book and sold it, and the day it came out his publisher organized a big book launch at Powell’s. The book had generated enormous advance praise—blurbs, profiles, puff pieces—stuff normally reserved for the idiotic fiction that she wrote. The book was called Blood Moon over Glasgow. There was a poem for every day he’d trawled the Kelvin River—listing every item he found. A portrait of our city, a Glaswegian reviewer wrote, Jack Geoffrey has done for Glasgow what Joyce did for Dublin.
At the end was a coda. A long poem—some reviewers would refer to it as an epic—about the love between Ezra and Alastair. And how a woman had come between them at the end. How Ezra, returning home from the hospital a day early to surprise Alastair, had seen the kiss between Brigid and Alastair from the window of his taxi, the night of the blood moon. A kiss so sudden it almost hadn’t happened at all.
The question was, how did Jack know about it. Had Alastair told him. Had Ezra.
Jack was walking to the mic now, after a long introduction by a local poet. He’d cut his hair. A sort of neo-Nazi look, she thought, the hair shaved on the sides but long on top. His signature round glasses and threadbare sweater. Rumpled pants. He reminded her of Woody Allen—or some quote about some person like him—it takes a lot of money to look this cheap. No, that was Dolly Parton. Well whatever, she thought. Same idea.
“Thank you,” he said. “After that kind of an introduction, I can only disappoint you.” The crowd laughed, as they always did.
“This is a poem about heartbreak,” he said. “I won’t read the whole thing. We’d be here for hours.” Again, laughter, although hers was nervous sounding.
“The real trouble,” he began, “when you are married to another writer,” and at this he paused; he was good at suspense, “is you never know what they’re seeing and what you’re missing.”
She scanned the crowd for someone she knew. But Jack’s newfound fame had brought with it only strangers. Their friends were at home, not wanting to stand in a line that looped around the block. She had started a new novel in Glasgow, but it was in its nonsense stage—plot-less, self-indulgent.
She supposed this was the way life would go now. Her in the audience, Jack on stage. Marital secrets and transgressions mined for material. Infidelity immortalized on the page. He’d changed everyone’s names to ones from Greco-Roman mythology. Alastair had become Aeneas. Ezra was Dido. He’d changed everyone’s name but hers.
I am sorry, she said after she’d read the poem for the first time—the proofs on the kitchen table, due back to Jack’s publisher in two weeks. I’m really sorry. It was so quick. Alastair was in shock—I mean, he was still so shaken up from what had happened to Ezra. I think he wanted to feel something, you know? Or be comforted. Maybe that. Maybe it was more of a comfort kiss.
Jack stood and poured himself a cup of coffee. It was eight a.m. Too early for an argument. Too early to say the things that needed to be said.
He sat across from her, slid the coffee cup her way. She took a sip and slid it back. The page proofs sat to her left.
“Well, good,” he said.
“Hm?” she asked.
“I mean, I don’t regret putting it in the poem anymore.”
“The kiss?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was a big risk.”
She took the cup but her hands were trembling too much for her to take a sip.
“We can recover from this,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He had his faraway look again, as though he were looking not at the floor but into another dimension.
“Nothing happened between my professor and me,” she said. “And the thing with Alastair—you said that you get crushes, too.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Jack said, his eyes focusing now on her. “I made it up.”
She looked at him as intently as he was looking at her.
“I made up the kiss,” he said. “It seemed like a thing that would happen, but I didn’t know that it had.”
She took the page proofs and flipped to the poem that contained the kiss between her and Aeneas, as he was referred to in the text.
This part would be written about extensively by critics, it being so explicitly in the style of Robert Frost—even lifting some of his exact phraseology:
And I saw them, or thought I saw them, Aeneas and Brigid,
She wasn’t moving away from the kiss
He asked with his eyes, not his lips
But it hadn’t really gone like that.
The night of the blood moon, she had stood on Alastair’s balcony, looking up at the alien sky. She was wearing a gauzy nightgown, and she could feel Alastair’s eyes running over the length of her body.
“Yes,” she said. “I missed you.” That part was true.
“Come here,” he said. He reached for her from his spot on the folding chair.
“What?”
“You heard me.” His voice was a whisper. She felt a ripple through her body. It was happening. She took his hand, felt the weight of it, the hair on his knuckles. His unmistakable smell—both desirable and repulsive—of meat. His undercut. That mole behind his ear.
And yet.
“No,” she said and drew back her hand. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
He frowned. She took a step backward. He reached for her again but this time with purpose. In one fluid motion, he had a firm grip on her arm.
“You know you want to,” he said, and brought her down onto his lap.
“No,” she said. She sprung to her feet but he had her by both arms now. He pulled her toward him, and she lost her balance.
“You want to,” he said and again pulled her down onto his lap. She could smell the mint stink of his toothpaste.
“No,” she said. She let the full weight of her body rest on him a second, then sprung up once more. Below her, she saw a taxi idling at the curb, the milky face of Ezra in the backseat, staring up at them.
You know you want to.
Did she?
Sort of. But also no.
And did she kiss him?
No.
* * *
But it was more powerful to let Jack think that she had.
“His tongue was like an eel,” she said to Jack after his reading at Powell’s. They stood in their kitchen in their socks. There was an after party in an hour and they were home to get changed. She thought about what she had worn in Glasgow—her black-and-white blouse and mini skirt—but this time with boots. “I can still feel it in my mouth, twitching, slimy, serpentine.”
She opened her mouth and let her tongue hang out. “Like this,” she said and wiggled it back and forth. “Alastair’s tongue. It was really awful.”
“Not like an eel,” Jack said. “A snake.”
She slid her tongue back inside the safety of her mouth. “What’s the difference?”
“Snakes are loaded with symbolism,” he said. “You can do something with the simile. But an eel—an eel is just an eel.”
“An eel is just an eel,” she repeated.
Their kitchen was small, with white subway tiles and white countertops, white appliances, and a white tile floor. He looked at her expectantly. She stood up. He looked at her longingly. Seven weeks now. She’d gotten out the magnifying glass. Not far enough along to tell anyone except Jack.
Jack’s phone buzzed. His agent. She was at the party already.
“We should get ready,” he said.
Her husband was the nicest man she knew.
So much had been written about the ends of marriages—the poignant domestic scenes; the moments of bitterness and cruelty and tenderness; the sweeping final paragraphs. So much had been written about violence and love. She thought, suddenly, of Othello smothering Desdemona.
“You go,” she said to Jack. “I’m going to stay home.”
“You’re not coming to my party?” he asked. He began to walk toward her.
She thought of her former writing professor in his Manhattan hotel room, eyeing the door. All the hours that must have gone by. The snow falling in clumps outside.
“No,” she said. “I’m not coming.”
You’re not? And why?
I’m trying to save my life.
