Cut from this thing I'm working on

God, how she’d love to open a wrapped box containing a sweater that someone had held up at arm’s length and decided to give to her. How she would love to belong to the kind of family that sat under chenille throws on comfy sofas and sipped headache-inducing spiced wine. Sloane wanted the people of her present firmly implanted in her past when her parents were still married and her brother’s vice was eggnog and the world was full of boys and girls that she hadn’t tried to love yet. She wanted to go back to when she was young and optimistic and could take in the world’s outrageous beauty without thinking of death.

Cut from this thing I'm working on

When depression breathes inside you like a hibernating beast, you can go as far back as you dare to, you can tunnel up the womb, but until you fix your head, no place will feel like home.

Cut from this thing I'm working on

Back up for a minute, the twins, the arrival room, the poorly printed banner. In the plane, Sloane had been given ice cubes by the stewardess when she asked for something to snack on, because everyone had some kind of allergy to nuts now. Sloane didn’t—Sloane was actually a big fan of protein, and she carried almonds and old cranberries around with her in a weathered Ziploc all the time, but someone told on her (the guy across the aisle with the pink and white neck pillow wrapped around his head?) and the next thing she knew, the stewardess was kneeling beside her and whispering in a conspiratorial tone, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, you really can’t eat nuts.”

            Back now to the banner and the countdown and the mother that Sloane hasn’t (physically) seen in such a time.

Big huge cut from a 2015 work in progress

            Here is some more information about Romain, the French man that Sloane wed. Sloane met him on year number four in Paris—a celebrated semiotician and Modern Culture and Media professor at the Sorbonne, he’d been asked to join a focus group that the trend forecasting company she worked for then for had formed for a client that was making a male line of body soap. Romain was known, among other things (his monochromatic dressing style! His full head of silver hair!), for specializing in all things having to do with human touch, and Sightline (her then company) wanted his expertise as to how the new soap should feel.

            Sloane was still susceptible to the seductions of smart men. Even after what she’d been going through with Romain, who had intellectualized all of the sex out of their life, she still got pretty excited by men who could pontificate about texture, taste, and touch. As he picked up all the materials they’d put out on the “inspiration table”—a vial of saffron, a bar of pumice, short-grain, wild rice—she fell first for his long, elegant fingers before he started to talk.

            Romain was like the veil swirling softly around the bellydancer of rhetoric. Word play, double entendres, innuendo, irony, to spend an hour in his company was to be reminded of the grace and elegance of true wit. At the first focus group, he’d had his rhetorical barrels firing—he bid them goodbye at the end of the session with a perfectly delivered anatanaclasis: “I don’t know what I’ll wash with, gentlemen, but I wash my hands of this.”

            When she met him, he was in an open marriage with a German (duchess) fifteen years his senior who lived in a separate house just outside of Paris in a bastion of sexual hysteria called Neuilly. He was in a relationship with two women to Karina’s five, and every trend forecasting gut in her body told Sloane not to get involved, but she was over the moon dreamy for this man’s mind. Love, she was going to tell her daughter in roughly seven years, should originate from your sex parts. Love from your libido first, then from your heart, but do not heed the mad directives of your mind.

            When she heard about the open marriage and the other girls, Sloane assumed, of course, that Romain was having sex with them, and concerning Romain, this was the first of many times when she’d been wrong.

            Basically, Romain was just taking these two women out to cozy dinners and priming them with gorgeous conversation before rubbing his penis into the soft place behind their kneecaps after dinner, under hotel sheets. Here is the biggest wrong that eclipses all the others in Sloane and Romain’s past: Romain had told Sloane upfront about his distaste for vaginal penetration, and she’d married him just the same.

            It is reprehensible how much a smart woman will excuse in order to stay with, and stand by, a smart man. In the amber scented confines of their elitist friends and foes, Romain had a reputation for being an extremely sensual, attentive, and unexpected lover. And this proved true, actually. He paid a lot of attention to places that women rarely had serviced anymore—the soft fold of the armpit, the taught webs of skin between the toes—but Romain Ender-Scott wouldn’t go anywhere near a vagina.

            They’d had sex in the beginning. It amazed her now, but they’d had sex (real sex, penetrative!) enough to make her think that he could change, which really means that she thought that she could change him. She’d asked Romain about it (this was the good thing about her husband, he had a problem putting his penis into her vagina, but he was very keen on the open flow of dialogue in and out of people’s ears), she’d asked him why he’d fooled her in the beginning with all that penetrative sex, and he said, (verbatim!) that she had a very handsome vagina, comforting and temperate, and that being inside her felt like curling up with a hot water bottle in his childhood home. But that later, (ah, the cruel effects of time!) having sex with her felt like an aggression, like he was trying to force something upon her, like it was a war of wills, whereas stroking and rubbing and ejaculating on her splendidly long back felt respectful and true.

            She got pregnant. Romain was happy. Once the baby came, Romain—still happy!—announced that he’d rather not ever have sex with her again. 

            It sounds better in French, but it was bullshit all the same, because regardless of how tenderly he said it and the words he used to say it, what it all came down to was that Romain did not want to enter her, or any other woman (he assured her) with his penis ever again. He understood her disappointment, but he’d had a change of heart.

            For a while, she made do by grinding against the tip of his hard penis, then, when that proved too “penetrative” for him, she outfitted her forefinger with a silicone, vibrating nub that she would hold against her clitoris while he rubbed his demented penis into her lesser-used folds, but one morning, as she was packing for an important three day conference in Vienna called “Futura Trends”, she caught a glimpse of herself standing over her open suitcase in her black knee-highs and a bra, her bush full and soft looking, her breasts more or less round, and their then one year-old’s toys scattered under and on top of and next to their bed, and she realized that this was not the way that she wanted to be loved.

            When a marriage has ceased feeling like a marriage for a long time, you’re not in terrific rush to end it. When she came back from Futura Trends, she told Romain that she wasn’t interested in any of his pushing and his rubbing and that, (in summary, Latin), she wanted all attempts at sexual physicality between them to end.           But that didn’t mean that she didn’t still want Romain as a husband. She knows, we know, that’s the part that’s tough to understand, but Romain was not only intelligent, he was attentive, and generous, and kind, and a lot of fun to be with outside of the marital bed. Whenever she was lost in a particularly tough project, or feeling like the work she did was little more than heady fluff, he would take her out—sometimes only for a walk to sit somewhere other than her desk chair, to pick at a sandwich, to watch the way all of the other people in Paris were handling the insane gift of life.

            He was also a good father—actually, he was great. You never know with intellectuals, but Roman was somehow—incongruously—made to be a dad.

He had more patience than she did for reading, and re-reading, and re-re-reading the same books, and he loved to thrill Jane with funny get-ups: adopting warbling voices for Jane’s puppets and Jane’s masks.

            That’s how the Zentai suit thing had started, or at least that’s what Sloane had hoped. The first time he walked into the living room in it (Jane was at daycare, and Romain was home for lunch), she’d laughed just like a little girl. But the body suit was integral: with no holes for your eyes or mouth, with no holes, anywhere, actually. When it was put on properly, when it was made of quality material, it looked like the wearer’s body had been dipped in liquid pewter.  

            “What’s that for?” She’d been working on her computer, and had gone back to working on her computer to ignore the fear that was riding inside her. What’s that for. He said he was giving a lecture the next day on the changing rules of touch. His students, they were born into a different generation of gestures than them: they scrolled, they tapped, they clicked on, but they didn’t use prolonged touch. The Zentai fetish represented both a refusal and an invitation towards personal touch. It presented the wearer’s body as an anonymous thing that could be contemplated in its entirety, but the skin could not be touched. “Isn’t it something!” she remembered him exclaiming, “The skin can’t be touched!”

            To summarize: after his lecture, which was a great success, Romain (Ender-Scott) was invited to give the same lecture somewhere else until he started receiving emails and phone calls from Zentai enthusiasts inviting him to Zentai meetings in Paris, in Zurich, in Amsterdam, in Berlin, all across Europe, everywhere in France.

            Romain started buying the Zentai suits in every hue of color. He wore them to his Zentai meetings, to his touch-centric lectures, he started wearing them around the house. Jane thought they were hysterical—she called him Spiderman. But Sloane knew what was going on at those Zentai meetings, and it didn’t make her laugh. Oh no, she didn’t think it was hysterical to know that he’d found an entire community with which he could exchange non-penetrative caresses. In Paris, they led an intellectual and open-minded and bohemian life, and these three descriptors fit for every one of their colleagues and almost all their friends, and although Sloane could envisage a future where they stayed together platonically and she went to the produce aisle and took herself a lover, she could not imagine a future in which Romain was running around the cobblestoned streets of Paris in a neon catsuit advertising the kind of sexual life he wanted, and finding himself devotees to love and rub him back.

            Sloane’s bath is finished now. She puts on a bra over her soft nipples, she pulls on a blouse. She uses the hotel hair dryer to dry her hair. She feels her daughter playing on the floor behind her, grabbing at her pant legs, peeking her head between her mother’s knees and finding it hysterical to be stuck there. Sloane misses her daughter’s grasping grubbiness so badly at that moment that her eyes prick with tears. She raises her hand to her face to stop the tears from coming and the sink’s faucet senses her movement and the sink turns on.  

From a 2015 book project, I hope!

After a while, since she was the only one with a child, (except for Tonya Harding, who was still skating around), Hunter asked her what it was like to be a mom. Hunter had rolled a joint by this point, which she was gamely sharing, but it had been mixed with a menthol cigarette, which made Sloane coast and cough.

            “I was surprised, actually, when I found out,” Hunter said, sucking in the smoke and the cold air. “I’d sort of pegged you for the childless route.”

            “Me too,” snickered Stephan, who had his head on Hunter’s lap. He watched Hunter puff smoke rings and flapped his hand in the direction from whence the smoke had come.

            “Me too, actually,” Sloane giggled. She was drinking champagne out of somebody else’s glass. There was a wine bucket full of bubbly at the bleacher’s edge. This was something else she never did in Paris: giggled, smoked, got high.

            “But the thing that no one tells you is that you tap into this higher frequency. Seriously, being a parent, it’s like you have access to this underworld that is right there under the surface of everybody’s lives. And you pass these haggard people while you’re down there, and you just understand them. And then you come up to earth again where everyone else is, I don’t know, going about their lives in this way that seems so fantastically careless to me now.”

            “Like what,” said Sumpti. “In terms of sex?”

            “God no, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that there’s not a single day anymore where I don’t think of death. I mean, there’s not even a day part for God’s sake. When I merge onto the highway, when I get into a plane, when I look outside my window and I see rain clouds, when my daughter is cuter than usual or easy to deal with, I hold her against me and I think about huge violence.” No one said anything. Tonya Harding was standing one legged on the ice rink, shaking something out of her skate. “I just hold her and think that this could all be taken away.”

            “That’s some fucked up shit,” said Hunter. “You need to appreciate what you have.”

            “But I appreciate it more because I can lose it at any minute. That’s the thing that’s become so pressing, that’s made me,” she looked up at the trees and faltered. “There’s not much more to add to it. I’m a mom obsessed with death.”

            “Well!” said Stephan, pushing himself upwards with one elbow. “That’s certainly depressing! Hunter! Does your mom still have the dance floor?”

            “Of course,” she shrugged, pointing. “The northeast tent.”

            “Shall we?” Stephan asked the motley crew.

            Sloane had never known her brother to be so socially solicitous, but she was glad that she’d divulged one of the reasons she was loathe to continue with her tour, her career, her life. She reached out for the menthol marijuana mixture and pulled at it, hard.

            “Last tango in Greenwich,” she said.   

Cut from a book project for 2015, I hope!

Yes, Hunter kept in touch with all the girls they used to be friends with, and yes, she’d even had sex with one of them but she wasn’t saying who, (Just kidding, it was Sonia), and yes, they were all still lithe and energetic and rich as fuck.

            “They’re probably in there somewhere,” said Hunter, nodding towards the pulsating mass of bodies crammed inside the glowing house. “If not, then they’re in Vail.”

From a (hopefully!) new book project for 2015

On the way home to Greenwich, passing what was left of the Greenwich homes. Well, there weren’t any of them left, really. When I was a little kid, there were beautiful trees hiding beautiful houses. White clapboard, black shutters, stone chimneys, imperfect grass. People had dogs they really cared about, but they treated them like dogs. Nowadays, when you ask someone if they have children, the non-children havers get self righteous and answer that they have a dog. To avoid hurting their feelings (because in the twenty first century, we don’t hurt each other’s feelings), you will say, “Well then, you understand.” But it’s total bullshit. If you don’t have a child, you can’t understand, and even though they wake you up at night to bark and poo and piss, a dog is not a child. My point is that I’m working things out, here. Sometimes I’m going to be “I,” and sometimes I’m going to be “Sloane.” It’s going to be confusing, but we’re going to have to deal with it. Come back in the car with me. Let’s look at my old home.

            Everything is new here where I used to live. Childless couples cross the threshold of foreclosed upon McMansions that were built on spec two years earlier and when they see the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and the kitchen island that is marble when what is cool now is cement, they say to their broker, well, obviously, it’s a total tear down. When I was still in high school, and the private community my parents lived in wasn’t yet a ghost town of foreclosed, too-big homes, a young couple rented the house next to ours while they constructed a house right down the street. They tore down the house that used to be there, a sprawling, three-story Tudor, and when they finished paying someone to build their dream house, they realized that they’d always wanted his and her sinks in the master bathroom, and then they got nervous that they’d forgotten about some of their other hidden wishes, so they started again from scratch. They tore the whole thing down. You will think I’m being sarcastic a lot throughout this book, or that I’m exaggerating. I do, sometimes, but I’m not exaggerating this. Their names were Kenneth Briggs and Jennifer Reilly, of Rochester and Atlanta, respectively, and they tore down their just-built, seven million dollar home because they’d forgotten to ask their builders for his and her sinks.

           

From a (hopefully?) new book project for 2015

Using, using, using, Sloane drummed inside her head, before coming back to her promise to leave him be for a little while. This is the thing though: you have children, and they grow up unable to handle the world’s possibilities, the flaxen blur of reeds rising from a salt marsh, the incalculable perfections of a child’s hand. So they do things to their bodies. They denigrate their minds. They slide into the shakehole, perpetuate the hurt.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

.... but after high school, at Juliard, he went in for composition and for a while, he was an emerging musical composer in the world of modern dance, but then his lifelong penchant for addictive substances took over and he became a drug addict before netting out at drunk.

            There are certain people who do not want to heal. People who need access to the specific briny beauty that the world affords you when you’re high; the transcendental high notes, the paludal lows. There are lots of performing artists with substance abuse problems, but the really successful ones have teams of people who check the automatic payment box on their cellphone bills for them, who schedule their hotel wake-up calls, who buy them airplane tickets and drive them to the planes.

            Or they play in a band and survive on a system of checks and balances with the other members of the group. With some exceptions, the severly drug addled are not playing Rachmoninov for a sold-out house in Lincoln Center. Stephan could have been a great composer, or he could have made a tolerable amount of money showing up (or sleeping through) gigs in hotel bars, but for him, it was the prestige of the concert pianist, or it was nothing else.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

She had a call on her voicemail from Maven Fox. It had started. The girls knew that she was back in town. Just like her sister, Lola, Sloane had her own set of girls. She called them the monograms and she’d gone to high school with them. Just like Lola’s set, these women were born as little girls in Connecticut, then they went south and west to come of age during college, then northeast to Manhattan for their first jobs in banking and event management and PR, and then they moved back to the bedroom town of Connecticut once they’d found a hedge fund manager to share a bed with. And then they had the kids. It was astonishing, all of the off-spring produced by former friends of hers. All of the darn kids. Sloane wanted no children until she became pregnant, and once she had one, she wanted two. When she was told by her husband that he never again wanted to have sex with her, she wanted all of the children. She wanted, effectively, to drown in kids. And now she’d come home to a set of women she used to be friends with who had everything they’d ever wanted: rich men who got it up for them, rainforest showers, radiant flooring, and 3.1 kids.

            Maven had run into Stephanie Williams who had run into her mom who had said that Sloane was back in town. Could it possibly be true? They absolutely totally just had to get together. How long was she around? Did she have plans for Thanksgiving? Well, obvs, of course she did! But they positively had to get together. Restaura did white wine flights now. They had to make a plan.

            Listen. Sloane doesn’t hate her female friends from high school. She envied the fact that they were already in their golden years, was the thing. Recently, at a party, she’d met someone who told her about a friend of theirs who’s life goal was to own a house with a two-car garage. At thirty-four, he’d done it. He wasn’t interested in kids or career advancement, just the house and the garage and now he had it and the rest of his life was just bonus footage, as far as he was concerned. Sloane envied her old friends for much the same reason—their DNA seemed to be configured without the restless gene that hers had. Sloane didn’t have an overarching goal for her life except that she wanted to feel less frenetic and concerned about her chances for survival, which was difficult to do in a world where restaurant managers were shot in the stomach for running out of bread bowls and (victims of sinking vessels) used dead porpoises as life preserver vests.

Cut from a new book project

While most of her friends here spent their weekends standing in line to nab a table at a restaurant so overcrowded they’d dine with elbows in their backs, Lydia could be found, more often than not, out in Rye with her sister, pushing broccoli puree inside of rigatoni so that little Jane would get some veggies down, or sitting with Sally’s eldest, Lucy, on a stack of hay as Peter rode Beltello around and around.

Cut from a new book project

And for what? It would be one thing if she worked hard to clothe and feed her children to outfit them with the energy and outerwear they needed for the day, but her five and eight year old used all of their consumed calories to stare at glowing screens.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

-->

Feb 9^th, 2014

The breastfeeding battle continues. I’m loathe to admit defeat but the harder I try, the less I produce, the less I produce, the more Gabriela rails against me, the more she protests, the worse I feel, the worse I feel, the more I get stressed, the more I get stressed, the less milk I produce.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

Throughout our home base in the Berkshires, we had a lot of friends to whom I could look for advice on a scaled back life with baby, but as I started asking questions and really observing what was happening in our circles, I realized that my generation was practicing a perverse hybrid of locavorism and attachment parenting that would pretty much guarantee that I never got to leave the house.

            On demand breast-feeding. Co-sleeping. Baby carrying to the extent that the baby never touched the ground. Cloth diapers. Homemade baby clothing. Organic, homemade baby food made from homegrown, heirloom vegetables. No pacifiers. No formula. Breast-feeding for the first two years of baby’s life.

            Let me tell you a bit about my life here in this rural town. We live on a road so out of the way from anything civilized, we have neither mail delivery nor trash-pick up. Our nearest convenience store is twenty-three miles away, and because we’re located in the middle of a microclimate in an already mountainous region, it’s common practice for us to be buried under five feet of snow, the bulk of which Diego and I spend countless mornings shoveling out of our steep driveway. In the winter, we heat our house almost exclusively with a wood stove. In the summer, we don’t have air conditioning. We didn’t have a washing machine until we hit our fifth year here, and we got a washer/dryer on our sixth. We have one bathroom for three bedrooms and a cat with big-breed heart problems that necessitates the twice-daily administrations of pills and an inhaler.

            None of this is to say that we have a hard life, because we don’t. This is just to say that we weren’t looking to make it any harder.

            Ever since the age of ten, I’ve been lugging around tote bags and eating root vegetables and drinking water out of funky smelling Nalgeens and avoiding single-use items like the bubonic plague. For decades, I’ve been as low impact as they come, letting it mellow when it’s yellow, re-using the same cloth napkin for a week’s worth of meals, making a chicken soup from the bones of every chicken we’ve ever roasted. So when it comes to the initial raising of this child, I just feel like, enough. I’m giving nine months to this unexpected project whose grand finale will push my body into the liminal state between humanhood and animalia, at which point I’ll start dripping creamy fluid out of my breasts like a cow.

            Enough. Enough! I’m not going to be washing cloth and Velcro diapers with my hands in a bucket like some busty hireling from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I’m not going to be signing paperwork so that some organ fairy can come down from the wilds of Northampton to encapsulate my placenta, nor am I going to make 4 x 6 souvenir, placenta prints. I’m not going to feel bad about getting liquid nutrients into my baby via a bottle so that I can have a little freedom and I’m not going to treat the last months of this pregnancy like an esoteric art project, leaving paper mâché belly molds around the house.

            What I’m finding as I move into my final pregnant months is that my generations’ lust for all things small-batch and difficult to come to mean that “easy” is no good, even in the realm of parenting. As the intelligentsia must ride their single speed bikes to Brooklyn to overpay for hand-crafted jars of mayonnaise for the sandwich they wanted four hours ago, so too must new parents go a crazy distance to be “good.” Cloth diapers, co-sleeping, home births, breast feeding for two years (or more!), attachment parenting, getting the child accustomed to hearing yes, yes, yes, (or at the very worst, “no thank you,”)—building this world where mommy and daddy are always there to cheer and protect them, that’s just not the way it works.

            I still hold strong memories of my mother tucking me in at night, the heady snap of her Joy perfume emanating from her clavicle, the sound of her necklace shushing against her skin as she leaned in to kiss me goodnight, a kiss that was frequently a goodbye before she headed to some place with clanking cutlery and shared cigarettes and floral arrangements, and I would dream about these places, and I didn’t cry.

            My parents were wealthy, then. I get that. They could afford a nanny and I can’t. But still. I don’t want motherhood—my motherhood—to resemble some obscure travail like artisanal pencil sharpening. I want it to be as fun as possible. As liberating as possible. I want it to be good. And right now that means taking the easy, low road all the way to a super pack of Huggies.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

I've always hated the beginning of a pregnancy memoir I've been writing. It's obnoxious. It sucks. I'm deleting it and pasting it here. RIP.

            When you’re looking forward to something, you see signs everywhere that the thing you want will happen. A little extra foam on your dry cappuccino? That barista you’ve been admiring finally loves you back. Your stoic boss sends you an email with an exclamation point in it? You’re getting a raise! You’ve been having an insatiable craving for wild mushrooms and lo and behold, the place you choose for lunch has wild mushroom ravioli as an appetizer. Obviously, within the next four days you are going to have mind-blowing sex.

            Wishful thinking is something we do in order to navigate the ups and downs of daily life. Certainly, for those of us with horrendous jobs, unmanageable family members, bipolar managers or unpredictable roommates, it’s imperative to allow ourselves to interpret mere coincidences as momentous signifiers of pleasant things to come, following them like magical bread crumbs to a land where dreams come true.

            The opposite of wishful thinking is denial. Defined by Google as “the refusal of something requested or desired,” denial also has a medical definition, such as this one by the American Heritage Medical Dictionary: “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” Mosby’s Medical Dictionary explains denial from another angle, one that takes into account the feelings or expectations of another person: “The refusal or restriction of something requested, claimed, or needed, often causing physical or emotional deficiency.”

            I am a writer. I hold platinum distinctions in denial. Since the age of seven, I have relied on phantasmagorical levels of rationalization to convince myself that someone, somewhere cares about the stories, poems and essays that no one has asked me to write. When a story of mine is rejected from a literary magazine, it’s not because it wasn’t polished enough, it’s because it’s too original. When my latest novel is turned down by editor after editor, it has nothing to do with the fact that I write one thousand words when two hundred would suffice, nor with my tendency to forget that even fictional characters sometimes need to leave the house, it’s because we no longer live in a world of risk-takers. It’s because they’re scared of my Bold Voice.

            Because I work from home as a copywriter in a rural area, I’m not exposed to the kind of reality-checks that would keep my delusions in line. I don’t have to show up at an office at any particular time, and I don’t have to dress in any particular way for any particular person. In fact, a consequential portion of my morning is dedicated to convincing myself that it matters if I shower. But matters to whom? It certainly doesn’t matter to the seven hundred ascetics who inhabit the fifty-three square miles of woods around the town in which I live, nor does it matter to my filmmaker husband, who also works from home, and is French, and has been wearing the same sweater for five years. The aforementioned “painful reality” is that it doesn’t really matter whether I put on underwear in the morning, or foundation, or whether I finish my eight-thousand word short story about a sadomasochistic carpenter or not. The denial comes in when I decide to do these things anyway. Because someone out there cares. Right? They must.  

Cut from a memoir I'm (sort of) working on

I turned to poetry, mentored first by the poet Forest Gander who supported my self-absorbed poems about sex and boyfriends and quirky things like Snow Cones, and then by Michael Harper, a Poet Laureate who did not. Professor Harper didn’t select me for his advanced poetry class, even though I’d already taken the pre-requisite class with Professor Gander. I heard from older students that Professor Harper liked people to beg, which I did, I doubt very humbly, in his third story office in the creative writing department on Waterman Street.

            An African American historian and a social force, Professor Harper tried to impress upon us the importance of context, meaning, research. For me, at that time, his words fell on deaf ears. I fell squarely into the other camp: the verbal school of impressionists who write when the mood passed through them. I know now that this is an intolerable, naïve and unrealistic school to be a part of it you have ambitions that include a readership beyond your local bar. But I didn’t know that then. In his review of my poetry thesis before the end of the school year, he said he didn’t want to see anything published by me for twenty years. When I asked him why, he said, “Because you won’t have anything to say.”

            At the time, his comment both saddened and enraged me, but years later when my rejections from editors and agents started to include notes of encouragement, I took solace in what Professor Harper had said. It gave me the courage to be patient, or at least, to try. After all, it wasn’t like I was trying to be a ballerina. After all, to be a good writer, to write about other people’s lives, you have to spend some time in your own.

            At the time of graduation, I was dating my French teaching assistant; an Adonis of a man named Jean Houdent An exchange student himself, his Visa had run out a year before I graduated, and so, with no request on my part for such a gesture, he sold all of his furniture and books upon his return home in order to afford a one-way plane ticket back to Providence to live with me until I graduated.

            This unexpected news was both flattering and horrifying, but I didn’t protest because the fiction lover in me wanted to see how the whole thing would unfold.

            My three female roommates were less interested in living through the next chapters with my unemployed, pot smoking, reggae loving Frenchman. The request that he live elsewhere came with Jean installed a periodic table of cocktails poster in the living room next to a framed poster of the black animated infant hero, Kirikou, which had absolutely no context if you weren’t a comic book aficionado, and French.

            As Jean was dead broke, I got him a job at the French creperie where I’d started working after I quit Starbucks, after having an hour docked off my timecard one day when I showed up with a little piping on the sleeves of my white shirt. My protests that it was a vintage bowling shirt went unconsidered, and I decided that a place that didn’t respect vintage athletic wear was not a place for me.

            Anyway—we made it through that year together and I moved to Paris with him a week after graduation, two suitcases stuffed indecently to bursting, determined to never come back.

            Upon arrival to his childhood apartment in the seventh arrondissement, I found that he hadn’t sold all of his belongings—just one or two things—and after several weeks of cohabitation with his doting, single mom it became apparent that he’d probably go the money for his plane ticket from her.

            That summer was a terrible one. The Jean I’d known in Providence had been a poetic capitalism hater with a boundless appreciation for literature and tennis. He liked sweet cocktails, camel lights and pot, but beyond his been-there-done-that stories of licking coke off of friends’ nipples, rolling on ecstasy at his grandfather’s foie gras farm and the like, he’d never given me any reason to suspect the three hundred and sixty degree personality turnaround that hit him—and us—in Paris.

            In an move incongruous with his personality, he pulled family strings, and then pulled them harder when he botched up the first interview but finally snagged a job as an analyst at Ernst & Young. He worked the long hours that such positions are known for while I stayed home in the apartment in a charmless street surrounded by postcard vendors and men in dashikis selling bottled water and Eiffel Tower key chains.

            I made sandwiches at home and took them to the nearby Champ de Mars where I perused the expat magazines for jobs that would let me keep my clothes on. Such jobs were hard to find. It was becoming resolutely clear to me that Jean Ralphaeo had been wrong—you did need a Visa as a foreign job applicant—it wasn’t something the French government just handed out at the Charles de Gaulle airport to little white girls who spoke French.

            With a miserable amount of savings and no friends to speak of, I started to sink into a depression that was worsened by my inability to find an even semi-dignified job. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Jean was cohabiting with two women who had a vested interest in taking tabs on him, he started staying away from home for entire days at a time, building a double life as a rising analyst by day and a clubbing coke fanatic by night. He would come back on Fridays, sallow-skinned and skeletal with a bag full of the Jekyll and Hyde outfits he’d kept in his car and sleep until Sunday night. On July 14^th, as Jean was sleeping off the aftermath of a particularly long MDMA trip, his mother went with me to the Eiffel Tower to watch the Bastille Day fireworks. As the displays became grander, brighter, more outrageous, I began to cry. No, this wasn’t Paris as I imagined it. Lonely, friendless and illegal, standing in a drunken crowd with my boyfriend’s mom. Jean had been doing so much coke, he’d actually lost a tooth.

            There was one more event that took place before I made the desperate call to the French chapter of Brown University that I’ve already described. One Sunday, out of nowhere, Jean became obsessed with the idea that I was cheating on him. While I sat on our bed wishing that it was true, he stormed around the apartment gathering all of my belongings while intermittingly updating travel websites to see when he could get me a one way flight back to New York.

            When I announced that I wasn’t going anywhere—or rather, that I wasn’t leaving Paris—he screamed that he was going to drive me to my lovers’ and threw everything I owned out of the fourth story window in preparation for our trip. When he realized that I had been doing laundry before he’d woken up from one of his drug naps, he stopped the spinning washer and threw my wet and sudded clothing out onto the pavement as well.

            By that time, I had an awful undocumented job at a place called “Paris International VIP Services” that promoted itself as a boutique guide and tour agency and translation center, run by an Indian man who exclusively wore leather overalls and worked on the side as an online shrink. He made me work with pseudonyms that expressed his brand values, so for four mornings a week, I was Earnest, Prudence, or Claire. I also had to read the emails from his online psychiatry patients in order to tell him who needed to be seen most (a.k.a., replied to). It was a horrid, horrid position, but because I worked the early shift there, I had the office key, so with all of my belongings in the back of the car stinking intermittingly of dog shit and laundry detergent, I told Jean to take me to my “lovers” place at sixteen Rue Pascal, the domicile of Dr. Nagpal Singh.

            Because I was still at an age where I confused drama with romance, Jean Ralphaeo made cameo appearances through the next three years of my life, with the dramatic curtain call taking place on my twenty-forth birthday in the city of Lyon where I was managing two weeks worth of parties in the next iteration of my professional life: party promoter and Coronamobile driver for Corona Extra.

            Diego had come with me on my “business trip” and we were actually lying in bed together when I got a text message from the maniac I hadn’t heard from in four months, a man whom I finally—truly—wanted out of my life, saying that he had driven three hours from Paris and was right outside my hotel. I gasped when I looked out the window from my eleventh story room and spotted his shitty Peugeot, and saw that he was.

            I made Diego come down to the lobby to act as a witness in case Jean stabbed or shot me. (Diego offered to walk out with me but I didn’t want him to get stabbed or shot, too.)

            With no explanation as to how he knew where I was or why he thought it was okay to come there, Jean produced a set of Japanese dishes and a tremendous ficus plant as birthday presents and said he’d made a reservation at the finest restaurant in Lyon. The epicurean in me took over—my first comment was, which one?—before launching into a diatribe informing him that he had no right to be there, that our relationship was over, that he couldn’t keep making unexpected appearances in my life and P.S I’d met somebody else and I loved him. Jean absorbed this information while I held onto the huge plant and then he asked me to marry him, an offer which the last name on my French passport will assure you I declined. Weirdly enough, my husband and I still have those bowls.

Cut from "My road dog, post-baby bod"

This is cut from an essay I'm working on for Fanzine:

When I was five months pregnant, I went on a road trip through northeast Mexico with my husband and became obsessed with the Spanish road signs that we passed. I copied them down in a journal with a plan to turn them into bookmarks with these abstract, Spanish phrases stenciled on. I have, so far, made one. What it says is that my body map is evolving. That there isn’t a specific destination, just this great and frightening journey with no room for a time out. What it says is, “Termina acotamiento.” Shoulder ends.

From an essay I'm working on about my cat

When I pulled the tab off the can of tuna shreds to feed our new cat for the first time, there was a crack, and then a hiss, and a briny, tinny odor that up until that point, had had no place in my life. I remember thinking, This is what it smells like to be responsible for someone else.

Cut from an untilted essay I'm working on

It was something that at this, my thirty-fourth summer on the planet earth, “heart problems,” this bog of hurt in quotes, would come back to taint the ground on which I’d built my life—a nice life, a small one. A log cabin. A cat. A husband.