one of my
papers was going to be published in an obscure academic
journal-I'd submitted it the previous fall. The professor who'd persuaded me to submit it insisted on opening a
bottle of champagne that he kept in a little refrigerator in his
office-for first publications, he said. I just kept reading the
letter, over and over again, until I had it memorized.
That was the only time I ever got to Jonathan's late,
fifteen whole minutes. And buzzed on champagne, too -lucky
I didn't get killed driving over on the bridge. I remember
Jonathan's look of dark concern and restrained anger when
Mrs. Branden led me in, flushed and spacey. He asked me
why I was late, and I remember the transformation his expression took-God, he has awarm, lovely smile, I thought-when I
told him about the publication.
"That's terrific, really terrific, Carrie," he said, taking
the chain off my collar. "God, that's really great, I knew you
could do it. Now go get the cane so I can give you five for being
late."
So my life continued, weird and schizy, but with a kind
of logic. It was the future that I couldn't deal with. I mean I had no problem leading this double life while I was an undergraduate, but I couldn't make myself fill out graduate school
applications. Later for graduate school, I kept thinking. Later
for any future at all. I felt as though I was in the middle of
reading - of living - this epic story, and it was all I could do
to keep turning the pages fast enough. Everything else would
have to wait.
Application deadlines passed and I didn't care. I started
telling people that I was going to take a year off. I even had an
elaborate song and dance worked out about how you couldn't
really know postmodern America until you'd put in some time
as a slacker. I said this a lot, I think, until one day I goofed
and said "slave" instead of "slacker." People thought I meant
wage slave, so it was okay, but I never said it again.
I wondered, now and again, if I weren't becoming some
kind of crazed cultist, a Manson girl, a Moonie. Was I throwing my promising life away? But I didn't think so. I mean,
I would have done-come on, I M-everything Jonathan
told me to do, but it was a different kind of doing what I was
told than selling flowers in airports. And I didn't think it was
my whole life. It was just what was happening to me exactly
then, in the present tense. Anyhow, as soon as I graduated, I
got my bike messenger job. Jonathan had never asked me my
plans. I guess he'd been confident, in that smug way of his,
that I'd be around for a while. Definitely not flattering, but I
was beyond finding any of this flattering. I just wanted it to
continue, to develop, to take its mysterious course. I thought
of us like Krazy Kat and Ignatz, or Wile E. Coyote and the
Road Runner, an eternal couple, enacting the endless themes
and variations of power and desire, ingenuity and redundancy
and pain. Someday, I thought, I would look down and see that I was standing on thin air, and then I'd go plummeting to
earth. But that was someday, not now. I was glad that when
I announced that my schedule was changing, he added a few
more hours a week to our routine.
In July, a month or so after I'd graduated, Jonathan told
me that he had to go to Chicago for two weeks on a business
project.
"I want you to come with me," he said. "It would be bad
to break our momentum, and anyhow, I don't want to go that
long without doing this."
Obediently-I was on my knees in front of him, back
arched-I said I'd find out if I could take some time off work.
Actually, the idea sounded pretty awful to me. Chicago in
August. Probably he'd allow me to wander around the Art
Institute a couple of hours a day while he was working and
the maid cleaned the hotel room. Then I'd probably have to
wait on my knees for god knew how long until he got back
from work, all tense and stressed with yuppie workaholism,
tie loosened, oxford cloth shirt and
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